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THE 


BAMPTON LECTURES 


1890 


PRINTED BY 
SPOTTISWOODR AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
LONDON 


MODERN CRITICISM 


CONSIDERED IN ITS RELATION TO THE 


FOURTH GOSPEL 


. 
Ι ΤᾺ 


BEING THE BAMPTON LECTURES FOR 1890 


BY 


HENRY WILLIAM ‘WATKINS, M.A. DD. 


SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD; FELLOW OF KING’S 
COLLEGE, LONDON ; ARCHDEACON AND CANON OF DURHAM, AND 
PROFESSOR OF HEBREW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM 


LONDON 
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE §TREET 
1890 


All rights reserved 


et es 
reece 
᾿ ἀν 


4 


ee A Ce 
FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT 


OF THE LATE 


REV. JOHN BAMPTON, 


‘I give and bequeath my Lands and Hstates to the 
Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford 
for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said 
Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes 
hereinafter mentioned; that is to say, I will and appoint, 
that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford for 
the time being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, 
and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and 
necessary deductions made) that he pay all the remainder 
to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, to 
be established for ever in the said University, and to be 
performed in the manner following : 

‘T direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in 
Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of 
Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to the 
Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the morning 
and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture 
Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary’sin Oxford, between 
the commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the 
end of the third week in Act Term. 

‘Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity 
Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the follow- 


vi EXTRACT FROM FOUNDER'S WILL. 


ing Subjects—to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, 
and to confute all heretics and schismatics—upon the divine 
authority of the Holy Scriptures—upon the authority of the 
writings of the primitive Fathers as to the faith and practice 
of the primitive Church—upon the Divinity of our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ—upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost 
—upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended 
in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. 

‘Also I direct, that thirty copies οὗ the eight Divinity 
Lecture Sermons shall be always printed, within two months 
after they are preached, and one copy shall be given to the 
Chancellor of the University, and one copy to the Head of 
every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the City of 
Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library ; 
and the expence of printing them shall be paid out of the 
revenue of the Lands or Estates given for establishing the 
Divinity Lecture Sermons; and the Preacher shall not be 
paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are printed. 

‘Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be 
qualified to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he 
hath taken the Degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of 
the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge; and that the 


same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons 
twice.’ 


PREHEFATORY NOTE. 


i ee 


To the Revd. the Vice-Chancellor of the 
University of Oxford. 


Dear Mr. Vicre-CHANCELLOR, 


One of the duties which is imposed upon 
a Bampton Lecturer by the ‘ Last Will and Testa- 
ment’ of the Founder is to print the ‘eight 
Divinity Lecture Sermons’ ‘within two months 
after they are preached,’ and to present copies to 
certain official persons. 

You will, 1 hope, permit me, while I have the 
pleasure of asking your acceptance of this copy of the 
lectures for 1890, the last of which was delivered 
yesterday, to accompany it with some brief prefatory 
remarks which may help the reader, in so far as he 
may care to do so, to approach these lectures from 
the point of view of the writer. 

The story of the genesis of this book is simple :— 

One day while walking with the late Bishop of 
Durham, when we hoped he was regaining strength, 


Vill PREFATORY NOTE. 


I took the opportunity of asking him how he 
accounted for the fact of the frequent assertion that 
the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel was disproved 
by modern criticism, in the presence of the strong 
and accumulating evidence in its favour. Those who 
have endeavoured to extract an opinion from that 
great Bishop and scholar during an afternoon’s walk, 
will not be surprised to hear that at the end of our 
stroll my question was not answered, but that I had 
been asked several others in the meantime, and that 
the suggestion was made that the subject might be 
profitably treated in a course of Bampton Lectures. 

The conversation recurred to my mind in a 
wakeful night, and I drew out a rough outline of 
the arguments which presented themselves. This I 
forwarded to the Bishop, who wrote the following note 
in reply :— 


I have read your scheme, and entirely approve of it. No 
subject could be more useful at the present day, and I think 
that the time has arrived when it can be effectively treated. 
Of course it will take much time, but it will be worth the ex- 
penditure. 

J. B. DUNELM. 


He was also kind enough, I believe, to express his 
opinion to more than one of the Heads of Colleges, 
and it was probably in consequence of that opinion 
that 1 was appointed to deliver the lectures of 1890. 


PREFATORY NOTE. ΙΧ 


The ‘much time’ which the Bishop saw would be 
needed for, and which he wished that I should give 
to the subject, has been largely filled by events which, 
if they had been foreseen, must have prevented my 
undertaking the duty that has now been ended rather 
than fulfilled. The Bishop’s own illness and death 
brought necessarily a large increase of public and 
private obligations; and these brought in their train 
a protracted inability for the vigorous performance of 
any duty. At the beginning of this year the time 
seemed to have come when I could hardly hope to be 
sufficiently well, or sufficiently free from pressing en- 
gagements, either to prepare the lectures or to deliver 
them. One of my oldest and kindest friends wrote :— 


It is impossible that he can do justice to himself, or what 
he will think of far greater importance, justice to his subject ; 
it would be in every way better that he should seek release 
from a duty which he cannot perform. 


I felt bound by no ordinary obligation to yourself 
and the other Heads of Colleges whose kindness had 
entrusted me with so great a responsibility, but I 
think that in my prostration I might have followed 
my friend’s advice, had not my eye fallen upon the 
last words which my Bishop had written to me just 
before his death. They seemed now to come from 
another world as a command which must be obeyed, 


and for which strength would be supplied. 


x PREFATORY NOTE. 


The lectures will, I hope, need little explanation 
to any thoughtful reader; but as their purpose has 
been somewhat mistaken, you will perhaps allow me 
to point out :— 

(1) That they are a course of eight lectures. 
No one lecture aims therefore at any com- 
pleteness in itself, but forms only a single 
step of the stairs. And the whole is a 
course of eight Lecture Sermons, with 
obvious limitations of time and place, and 
not an independent work, and cannot 
therefore aim at full treatment of so wide a 
subject. The eight steps can at most form 
a staircase, and are not a furnished house. 

(2) That the subject is not the Fourth Gospel, 
nor yet the evidences, external or internal, 
in favour of its authenticity or genuine- 
ness, but ‘ Modern criticism considered 
in its relation to the Fourth Gospel.’ 
The evidences are abundantly discussed 
elsewhere. My purpose is to estimate the 
criticism which this century has produced 
in our own and other countries. I believed 
before commencing these investigations, 
and believe now, with ἃ confidence 
which does not fall short of certainty, 
that there is no foundation for the asser- 


PREFATORY NOTE. ΧΙ 


tions which are so often made and ac- 
cepted, to the effect that modern criticism 
is fatal to the claims of the Fourth Gospel ; 
and 1 have tried to show this. 

(3) That the examination which I have en- 
deavoured to make has relation to the 
Fourth Gospel, and to the Fourth Gospel 
only. It cannot in fairness be fully ex- 
tended to any other book of the New 
Testament, and still less to any book of 
the Old Testament. The evidence in re- 
lation to any given book in one of these 
libraries must be examined separately. 
The case of the Fourth Gospel is, however, 
admittedly the one in which there has 
been the greatest array of hostile critics 
and the loudest assertions of victory. If 
these critics are disarmed and the victory 
is shown to be on the other side, we may 
well doubt whether a similar array of 
hostile criticism and similar shouts of 
victory are not in the same way to be 
distrusted in analogous cases. But the 
argument from analogy must not be un- 
duly pressed. The wise man will use it 
with caution, but he will nevertheless 


use it. 


ΧΙ PREFATORY NOTE. 


(4) That in these lectures no reference has been 
intentionally made to any work which is 
not named in them. Iam of course not 
unaware that considerable discussion has 
arisen in Oxford with regard to more than 
one recent utterance which has been made 
there. But from the day of my appoint- 
ment as lecturer, I have thought it my 
duty to abstain from reading or hearing 
any such utterance. It seemed to me to 
be right to speak of my own subject with- 
out introducing any tinge of feeling which 
might seem to come from possibility of 
personal reference to any member of the 
University before which these lectures 


were to be delivered. 


Perhaps some few words should be added as to 
the method which has been followed. To examine 
evidence required the production of witnesses, and 
the number of witnesses has rendered the treatment 
much more technical than I could have wished. I 
have allowed every witness, as far as possible, to speak 
for himself, and have supported his evidence by 
reference to its original sources. 

It will appear to every reader that I have for this 


purpose made full use of the many guides to this 


PREFATORY NOTE. Xl 


knowledge which are now within reach. To the 
scholar it will, 1 hope, appear also that these guides 
have been used only as roads to the quarries. Con- 
siderable pains have been taken to make the references 
really useful to the student. They will be often found 
to differ from those in other works which cover com- 
mon ground and to which I am frequently indebted. 
It is too much to hope that they will not sometimes 
be found to be wrong, for there is many a slip between 
the page of the author who is quoted, and the printed 
page of the writer who quotes ; but it should not be 
concluded that they are wrong, because they differ 
from those in other works :— 


Tlli in nos seviant, qui nesciunt cum quo labore verum 
inveniatur, et quam difficilé caveantur errores. 


It will be specially evident that I have made con- 
stant reference to German authorities, and while I 
have had occasion to dissent from the position which 
has been assigned to some of them by certain English 
writers, | should be indeed ungrateful if I did not 
feel that the investigations of German scholars— 
investigations perhaps rather than results—have 
placed all workers in this field under an obligation 
which cannot be too fully acknowledged. 

On more than one occasion in the lectures I have 
had to apologize for a too cursory treatment of an 


X1V PREFATORY NOTE. 


important point, and I feel on reviewing them as a 
whole, that there are few pages which do not offer a 
peg on which an ercursus may well be hung. I had 
intended to make at least some such additions, but to 
do so with any approach to completeness would add 
a second volume as bulky as the present one. This 
would make it, moreover, impossible for me to fulfil 
the Founder’s condition as to printing the lectures, 
and impossible to keep the price of the book within 
moderate limits. Perhaps there is now as much of 
technical detail as ‘eight Divinity Lecture Sermons’ 
can fairly bear. 

If anyone who heard the lectures should do me 
the honour of reading them, he will find that several 
passages in each lecture were omitted in delivery, and 
that some were condensed. As it was,I fear that I 
trespassed somewhat unduly on the kindness and 
attention of my hearers. I have also changed a word 
or two in a few passages ; but I have not ventured to 
make any important change or to alter the ‘ Lecture 
Sermon’ form of the whole. It seems to have been 
the intention of the Founder that this form should 
be preserved, and that the lectures should be printed 
as they were delivered before the University. 


It remains for me to add that these lectures owe 


much to the fact that more than one kind friend has 


PREFATORY NOTE. eV 


looked at them as they have passed through the press. 
If I do not publicly thank these friends by name, it is 
because they ought not to be made in any way respon- 
sible for much with which they would possibly not 
agree. ‘The name of one dear friend, Bishop Lightfoot, 


has been mentioned in connexion with them :— 


Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit. 


What I owe to him is more than I can tell or can 
myself know, and it would be my greatest happiness 
to think that any trace of this debt were to be found 
in these lectures which came from his suggestion ; 
but it is due to his memory and to my readers, to 
make prominent the fact that no word of them was 
known to him. The general plan has his zmprimatur, 
but this cannot be extended to any part of the 
execution. I cannot doubt that this execution would 
have fallen far below his idea ; for I know that it has 
fallen far below my own. Of some passages he would 
certainly have disapproved, and were he still with us 
they could not have been spoken. Of these the reader 
will as certainly approve; for no estimate could 
rightly be made of the criticism of the Fourth Gospel 
in this century, without frequent reference to the most 
competent witness that the century has produced. 


There is one who is more than a friend, whose 


hand never tired when I was able only to dictate, and 


Xvi PREFATORY NOTE. 


without whose constant help these lectures could not 
have been written and could not have been printed. 


To yourself, Sir, and the other Heads of Houses, 
my thanks are due, not only for the honour conferred 
upon me by your appointment, but for much generous 


courtesy which has been freely extended to me. 
I have the honour to remain, 


dear Mr. Vice-Chancellor, 


Your faithful and obliged servant, 


H. W. WarxKINsS. 


ATHENZUM CLUB: 
June 9, 1890. 


*.* The Lectures were delivered on the following dates 
in conformity with University arrangements: 
In Lent Term : Lectures I.-ITI., March 2, 9, 16. 


In Easter Term: Lectures IV.-VII., April 27, May 4, 
11, 18. 


In Trinity Term: Lecture VIII., June 8. 


CONTENTS: 


LECTURE I. 


For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth. 
2 Cor. xiii... 


I. INTRODUCTION. 


A. The Subject stated : Modern criticism and the Fourth 
Gospel . 


B. Divisions of the Subject : The ‘judgment of centuries.’ 
‘Our age.’ Width of inquiry. 


C. Tone of discussion: Anti-theological prejudice. 
Renan. Mental achromatism. This achromatism 
impossible 


Illustrations :-— 
(a) James Mackintosh 
(8) David Hume 
(y) The Adventurer 
(δ) ‘Cowardly Agnosticism ἡ 
(ε) Mark Pattison 
(¢) Fortnightly Review 
(7) Pope 


D. Friendly and adverse witness : Dean Stanley. Advo- 
cate or judge? Position of a Bampton Lecturer 


al 


PAGE 


10 


13 


Xvill CONTENTS. 


PAGE 
_ IL. Evmence or THE SEcoND CentTURY: The Third Genera- 
tion :— 


A. Church of Lyons : 


Irenzeus : His date, and work against Gnosticism. 
His use of the Fourth Gospel ; : pees | 


B. Church of Alexandria : 
Clement: His origin, date, teachers, and pupils. 
His frequent use of the Fourth ane John 
and the ‘spiritual Gospel’ . Α Say ace 


C. Churches of Rome and Carthage : 


Tertullian: His position as a writer, date, and 
training. His frequent quotations from the Fourth 
Gospel. Passages from his works :— 


(a) Rule against heretics 
(8) The Apostolic churches 
(y) Authors of ‘ Evangelical Instrument’ 
(5) Apostles handed down that which was from 
the beginning 
(ε) The Evangelist and beloved disciple . . 22 


D. Church of Antioch : 


Theophilus: His writings testified to by Jerome 
and Eusebius. His Commentary on the Gospels 
doubtful. Importance of the treatise To Autolycus. 

Its undoubted reference to the Fourth Gospel, 
which is included among ‘ Holy Scriptures,’ and 
the author among ‘ spirit-bearing men’ : ΠΥ 


E. Churches of Asia Minor : 


Melito: Witness from Sardis. The probable date of 
his writings. List given by Eusebius. Other 
lists. His full testimony to the Fourth Gospel 


©5 
Go 


Apolinaris: Witness from Hierapolis. List of his 
works given by : 
(a) Eusebius 
(8) Theodoret 
(y) Photius 
His reference to the Fourth Gospel ᾿ . 36 


CONTENTS. X1X 


PAGE 
Testimony to the writings of Melito and Apoiinaris 
given by: 

(a) Polycrates 

(8) Hippolytus 

(vy) Tertullian (quoted by Jerome) 

(δ) Clement of Alexandria 

(ce) Anastatius of Sinai 

(¢) Serapion, and other bishops 

(7) Jerome 

(6) Socrates 


~I 


sy) 


Polycrates: Witness from Ephesus. His testimony 
to the Fourth Gospel in a letter addressed to 
Victor of Rome. His own account of his position 41 


F. The Old Latin and Peshito Versions, and the Mura- 
torian Fragment : 


Liddon’s approval of Westcott’s opinion on : 


(a) The Old Latin 
(8) The Peshito 
(y) The Muratorian Fragment . 


oom 
bh 


Force of the evidence if their early date is esta- 
blished 


Recent opinions : 
(a) Bishop Lightfoot 
(8) Von Dollinger 


Result independent of these opinions . Ξ . 44 


Summary: Strength of testimony. Its extent and unan- 
imity in the third generation of the Second Century. 
The corporate life of the Church. Answer of the 
author of Supernatural Religion is no answer. Conclu- 
sion 


iN 
=P) 


xx CONTENTS. 


LECTURE II. 


Remember the days of old, 
Consider the years of many generations ; 
Ask thy father, and he will show thee ; 
Thine elders, and they will tell thee. 
Deut. xxxii. 7. 


PAGE 
I. EvipENCE OF THE SEecoND CENTURY: The Second Genera- 
tion :— 


A. Justin Martyr: His conversion. His estimate of the 
ethics of opinion. His writings. Chronology not 


accurately known 53 
Opinions of : 
(a) Credner 
(8) Volkmar 
(y) Hort . , ‘ : : ; ee 


Date of the First Apology and Dialegue: Their 
evidence to the use of the Fourth Gospel. Nature of 
an apology. The Dialogue an apology addressed 
to the Jews. Position of an apologist in the 
Second Century illustrated by later apologists : OS 


Examples : 
(a) Tatian 
(8) Athenagoras 
(y) Tertullian 
(δ) Cyprian. : f ᾿ ‘ : | ties 


Direct reference in Justin to the Evangelists ought 
not to be expected. What traces of the Fourth 
Gospel are actually found . ; : ‘ . 4 


Memoirs : Recurrence of term. 
Examples : 
(a) The Memoirs 
(8) Memoirs of the Apostles 
(y) Memoirs of His Apostles 
(5) His Memoirs 
Memoirs further described . : ; ᾿ ᾿ oe 


CONTENTS. XX1 


Memoirs considered as, ss 
(a) a written record of the Lord 
(8) sacred books 
(y) of Apostolic authority 
(δ) coming from the Lord Himself . : Aen 1 


Use by Tertullian, Irenzeus, and other contempo- 
raries and followers. Identity therefore of the 
Memoirs with the Four Gospels. This proved by 
Tatian’s Diatessaron, the key to Justin’s Memoirs. 

The identification is made by Justin, and known 
to Irenzeus and others. The Fourth Gospel cer- 
tainly included in the Memoirs . : . . 68 


Results of recent investigations of this question by: 
(a) Thoma 
(8) Hilgenfeld 
(vy) Ezra Abbot 
(δ) James Drummond 
(ε) Sanday 
(ὦ Westcott 


Consensus of opinion : : : : A Lis 


Why did not Justin quote more fully from the 
Fourth Gospel? Reasons suggested. Existing 
works only fragments . ‘ ς ; - δὶ 


B. The Clementines: Now certain that the Fourth 
Gospel is quoted in the Homilies. Their probable 
date. Importance of their evidence ᾿ : 2 18a 


C. Valentinus: His date. His importance as a witness. 
His followers form two schools : 
(a) Inthe East : the Excerpta Theodoti and Doc- 
trina Orientalis 
(8) In the West: Ptolemzeus and Heracleon . 85. 


Testimony to their works and knowledge of 8. John by: 


(a) Irenzeus 

(8) Epiphanius 

(vy) Clement 

(5) Origen 

(ε) Hippolytus . d : : ; : ee 


XX CONTENTS. 


PAGE 


The testimony of Valentinus to the Fourth Gospel. 
The Valentinians a school. The Catholics also a 
school. Statements by Irenzeus and Tertullian. 
Conclusion as to the use of the Fourth ‘(ian by 
the Valentinians . ᾿ ᾿ g ee 


D. Marcion: His date. Reason for his rejection of the 
Fourth Gospel. The testimony of Tertullian and 
Irenzeus shows that he was acquainted with it . . 93 


Il. EvipeNcE OF THE SECOND CentURY: The First Genera- 
tion :— 


A. Polycarp: Date of martyrdom . ‘ : : τ Ὸθ 


B. Papias: The writings. Testimony οὗ Irenzus to 
Papias and Polycarp. His Letter to Florinus. 
Testimony of Eusebius to Papias_ . : . 96 


C. Basilides: Probably referred to by Papias. His date, 
treated more fully in Lecture VII. : ; . 100 


Summary: Result of the evidence of the Second Century 
in the third, second, and first generations: That the 
Fourth Gospel was accepted throughout the Century as 
the work of John the Apostle and Evangelist : . 102 


LECTURE III. 


And... many... believed . . . because of the word of the 
woman, who testified, .. . And many more believed because of his 
word ; and they said to the woman, Now we believe, not because of 
thy peablan: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is 
indeed the Saviour of the world.—John iv. 39, 41, 42. 


I. Facts or THE Receprion. THEe EVIDENCE OF SIXTEEN 
CENTURIES. 


Fulness of evidence to the use of the Fourth Gospel 
in the third and succeeding centuries. Details not 
needed, but bird’s-eye view . ; ᾿ : + 107 
A. Evidence of the Third Century : 


The Muratorian Fragment. The Versions . . 108 


CONTENTS. XXi 


Eastern Church: 
Origen: His division of the sacred writings 
Dionysius : His opinion on the Fourth Gospel and 
the Apocalypse opposed to that of modern nega- 
tive criticism 
The Apostolical Constitutions 


Western Church : 
Evidence of : 
(a) Caius 
(8) Hippolytus 
(y) Cyprian 


B. Evidence of the Fourth and succeeding Centuries : 


In the East : 
(a) Eusebius 
(8) Cyril of Jerusalem 
(vy) Athanasius 
(5) Didymus 
(ε) Gregory of Nazianzus 
(¢) Amphilochius 
(n) Epiphanius 
(6) Theodore of Mopsuestia 
(.) John Chrysostom 


Period of the Uncial MSS. Survey of the lists, 
canons, and councils. Close of Canon in the Kast. 
No doubt as to the Fourth Gospel 


On the borderland : 
(a) Hilary of Poitiers 
(8) Philaster of Brescia 
(y) Rufinus of Aquileia 


In the West : 
(a) Jerome 
(8) Augustine. Close of Canon in the West 


The Alogi: an apparent exception to universal 
acceptance of the Fourth Gospel. Name appears 
first in Epiphanius. They ascribe the Gospel to 
Cerinthus. Rejection by Zeller. These supposed 
antagonists are really positive evidence 


PAGE 


. 109 


1 


110 


. 120 


. 122 


. 122 


. 123 


XX1V CONTENTS. 


PAGE 
II. PrincreLes oF THE RECEPTION. 
A. Views now commonly held : 
(a) The authority of the Church 
(3) The inner witness 
(y) Verbal inspiration 
(5) Canons of historical and literary criticism . 127 


B. Treatment of the question in the Apostolic age : 

Idea of writing excluded. Oral tradition and 
writings side by side. Reasons why the early 
Church did not provide a Canon of Scripture. 
New Testament writings not regarded as ‘Scrip- 
ture.’ Examples 3 : : : : . 140 


©. The question in the post-Apostolic age : 
Gospels not quoted as Canonical. Johannine influ- 
ence. Growth of reference to the words of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. Constant appeal to the ‘ Word 
of the Lord.’ mines Of Individual churches and 
writings. 3 : . 142 


The idea of a Catholic Church not yet realized. 
Heretics the first to quote the Scriptures. Obli- 
gation, therefore, of the Church to draw up a 
Catholic Canon. The Canon a question of 
history, not of dogma. Tradition the first for- 
mative principle. In the third and fourth cen- 
turies, tradition became one with the sacred Scrip- 
tures. The Scriptures depend on the Church; 
the Church on the Scriptures. : : . 146 


Testimony of : 


(a) Augustine 
(8) Jerome ; : : : : 5 . 149 
The Canon accepted on the authority of the Church 
until the Reformation. Acceptance of the Fourth 
Gospel in the Dark Ages. ; : : . 151 
D. Altered view of the Scriptures at the Reformation : 
Position of : 


(a) Bodenstein of Carlstadt 

(8) Luther 

(y) Calvin 

(δ) Zwingli.. 4 : ᾿ ; : . 152 


CONTENTS. XXV 


PAGE 


The Council of Trent. Theinfallibility of Scripture 
substituted for the infallibility of the Church. 
This infallibility attacked by modern criticism . 155 


EK. Verbal inspiration a new departure : 
Opinions of : 
(a) Westcott 
(8) Bishop of Carlisle 
(vy) Newman 
(5) Bishop of Amycla 
(ec) Richard Baxter 
(Ὁ Neander . ᾿ ‘ : : 3 » LD 


Summary: Result of the ‘judgment of centuries.’ Com- 
prehension exemplified in width of the induction. 
Depth of conviction shown by instances : 


(a) Venerable Bede 
(8) Bishop Lightfoot : : s : > 168 


LECTURE IV. 


Is there a thing whereof men say, See, this is new ? it hath 
been already in the ages, which were before ws.—Eccles. i. 10. 


CrITICISM oF ‘OuR AGE.’ 


Assertion cannot be accepted as proof, nor yet 
originality 


Destructive criticism not sufficient. Constructive 
demanded . 4 i 2 ἣν ; : : 109 
A. Evanson : 
The Dissonance of the Gospels. The author. The 


work, unworthy of the subject. : ‘ 174 
Replies by : 
(a) Priestley 
(8) Simpson. : : ᾿ : . 170 


Survey of German influences at the opening of this 
century. The Romanticists and others. Bearing 
of these years on the Gospels. : : Ὁ 177 


ΧΧΥῚ 


CONTENTS. 


B. Bretschneider : 


Life and earlier works : 
The Probabilia. Its purpose and scope. The J ohan- 
nine discourses largely imaginary. The author not 
the Apostle, nor a Palestinian, nor a Jew. The 
Gospel sprung from Jewish anti-Christian zeal, 
and cannot be supported from the Apocalypse 
nor from the Epistles. The Epistles themselves 
are not proved to be Johannine, and they 
strengthen adverse views about the Gospel. The 
external evidences not sufficient. Weight of 
opposing internal evidence. The place probably 
Kgypt. Summary 


Importance of the book 


\ Bretschneider convinced by replies: His definite 


and repeated retractation, ‘ Question is settled’ 
Bretschneider’s character in the Autobiography 


C. Strauss : 


Home life. Blaubeuren. Tiibingen. Berlin. 
Tutor at Tiitbingen. Influence of Schleiermacher. 
The calm of 1834. The storm of 1835 


The Leben Jesu. The replies. ‘Nothing new’ in 
the Leben Jesu 


Strauss’s critical methods. The ‘ mythical bmg ἡ 
Later investigations of myths 


Position of : 
(a) Bunsen 
(8) Ullmann 
(y) Baur . 


The Leben Jesu contained no critique of the Gospels 


Strauss’s incredible uncertainty about John, 
described by Baur 


Strauss’s life between the third aia uae editions 
of the Leben Jesu 


Nomination to Ziirich 
The fourth edition 
The Christliche Glaubenslehre 


No theological work produced by Strauss in period 
1840-64. Agnes Schebest. Strauss in parlia- 
ment ; ° : . . : 


. 180 


. 187 


ae) E 


. 194 


. 196 


. 197 


CONTENTS. XXVIl 


PAGE 


The new Leben Jesu, 1864. Its scope. Written for 
the laity. ‘Theologians are the least impartial.’ 
Renan. Earlier Lives of Jesus. Critique of the 
Gospels. The ‘ Theologian’ clings to the Fourth 
Gospel 4 : Σ ; : . 202 


The external evidence : 
(a) Its weakness 
(8) Papias 
(y) The Fourth Gospel itself 
(8) Second Epistle of Peter 
(ε) Ignatius 
(¢) Justin Martyr 
(η) The Philosophumena . : : : . 206 


The internal evidence : 
(a) The Valentinians 
(8) The Montanists 
(vy) The Clementines 
(δ) Apolinaris 
(c) The Apologists 
(¢) Theophilus 
(n) Ireneeus. : ; : : : . 209 


The Alogi: Their tactical mistake in rejecting the 
Apocalypse. Summary. : : : 911 


Strauss returns later to the Johannine question. 
His critique is really that of the Tiibingen School. 
The older work will not fit on this new critique. 
Conscious and unconscious fiction. Strauss and 
Baur. Re-writing of the theory of myth. 
Bruno Bauer. Volkmar. Larlier and later 
theories of myth ‘ ‘ : F ὃ ΤΟ 


Strauss’s disappointment 
His view of 

(a) Ewald 

(8) Baur 


The ‘mythical theory’ dead. Myth cannot live 
with Design. Renan’s theory of legend. . 217 


Summary: Strauss makes no substantial addition to the 
criticism of the Fourth Gospel. : : : . 219 


XXVIil CONTENTS. 


LECTURE V. 
And not even so did their witness agree together.—Mark xiv. 59. 


I. Toe New TUBINGEN SCHOOL: 


A. Baur: PAGE 
Evangelical sympathies Influenced by Schleier- 
macher and Hegel : : : Α : . 223 


Work αὖ Blaubeuren and Tiibingen 

Extent of his literary work. List of books and 
shorter writings . Ξ : " , ‘ . 225 

Baur’s method of investigation. Pauline and 
Petrine parties. Four Pauline Epistles. . 228 


At first took no part in the ‘Johannine question,’ 
but was afterwards convinced that it was a 
‘tendency-writing.’ Application of the principle 
to the ‘mythical theory’. : : : . 230 


Combination of results: 
Three stages :— 


(a) To a.v. 70: The documents 
(8) τὶ 70 το Τρ τὰ 
(y) From a.p. 105 ,, " 
The Johannine Gospel . : : : : . 232 


B. Followers of Baur : 
Schwegler 
Ritschl 
Hilgenfeld 
Ko6stlin 
Volkmar 
Holsten 
Zeller 3 Σ ; ; i - i . 234 


Baur bound by the Hegelian ean Development of 
philosophy . ‘ ; : 3 : . 237 


Baur’s theory an arch. The arch tested. The 
foundations doubted . : : Ἶ - . 298 


CONTENTS. ΧΧΙΧ 


PAGE 
The workmen questioned : 


(a) Volkmar 
(8) Hilgenfeld 
(y) Ritschl 
(δ) Holsten 
The arch aruin . : : : : i : . 240 


French writers : 
Stap 
D’Kichthal . : 2 : Ἶ ἃ . 244 


German criticism of the Tiibingen school : 
(a) De Wetie 


(8) Meyer . - . : : ; ‘ . 245 


Il. THe Partition THEORIES: 


Eckermann 
Ammon 
Paulus 
Weisse 
Schenkel 
Schweizer 
Tobler 
Ewald 
Hase 

Reuss 
Renan 
Sabatier 
Weizsicker 
Wendt ; ς ; : : : ; . 246 


Ill. Tot NEGATIVE SCHOOL : 


A. German : 
Keim 
Holtzmann, Heinrich 
Honig 
Thoma 
Mangold 
Holtzmann, Oscar c ; : : ‘ . 258 


XXX CONTENTS. 


PAGE 
B. Dutch : 
Scholten : : Σ : : ; : . 263 
©. English : 
Tayler 
Author of Supernatural Religion 
Opinions of this work by : 
(a) Zahn 
(8) Salmon 
Abbott 
Davidson : : ‘ ‘ : ; Σ : . 266 


Examination of his works: 


The First Introduction. 

Dedication. The newer criticism. The author’s 
position. View of the Fourth Gospel. Conclu- 
sion as to its authenticity . : : : B72 

The Second Introduction 


Change of view and later opinions on the Fourth 
Gospel. Similar treatment of the Acts of the 
Apostles. Criticism on this change by Schiirer. 
Both views cannot beright. His position between 
the two editions . ; ς : : : . 218 


D. The two latest critics : 
Martineau 

His general position ‘ : Ἶ ‘ . 286 

Views on: 
(a) The unity of composition 
(8) Author 
(y) External evidence 
(5) Internal evidence 
(ε) The Apocalypse 
(¢) Paschal controversy 
(η) The ‘ Marks of Time 
(0) The First Epistle . ἶ : : . 287 


Delff ᾿ ; : ; ‘ . 292 


CONTENTS. XXX1 


PAGE 
Views of these critics on: 


(a) Eye-witness 

(8) Unity 

(y) Period 

(δ) Subjective criticism 


Compared and found to be diametrically opposed . 293 


CONCLUSION : ε Η ᾿ Ἶ : ε ᾿ . 295 


LECTURE VI. 


At the mouth of two witnesses or three shall every word be 
established.—2 Cor. xiii. 1. 


I. INTRODUCTION : 


Schleiermacher : 

His position, influence and character. His writ- 
ings. Free treatment of the New Testament. 
Special views on the Fourth Gospel. Johannine 
authorship upheld throughout : : ; 200 


Neander : 


Change of name from Mendel to Neander. Special 
qualifications. His Life of Jesus, and Lectures on 
8. John : ὶ : : ; : . 304 


De Wette : 


Karly essays. His character and life. Liberal views. 
The Johannine question. His Introduction and 
Commentary. ; : ὶ : : : i DOT 


Liicke: 


The Berlin group. The Commentary. The religious 
sense. Acquaintance with the newer theories. 
Result of his criticism . ; : : ὶ . 310 


Bleek : 


Estimate of his powers. Carlier writings. The 
Beitrige. The Introduction . : ' . 313 


ΞΕ Ἐς ὦ 


ΧΧΧΙΪ CONTENTS. 


PAGE 
Bunsen : ᾿ 

Arnold’s opinion of him. Fourth Gospel a ‘ cardinal 

point’ . : : ; : : : . 315 
Ebrard : 

Writings on the subject. Strong views on the Fourth 

Gospel and on negative criticism. " 4 Pa wg 
Tholuck and Hengstenberg : 

Their influence and weight of opinion. Commentaries 

on S. John. ; - : : ς . 918 
Meyer : 

Wide range of work and time. Review of the nega- 

tive criticism. Delight in Luther’s testimony . O19 
Lechler : 

His works. Doctrinal forms prove Johannine author- 
ship. Changeof view. Intellectualism. Abides by 
view of S. John : : ; : : ‘ . d21 

Weiss : 

His works. Johannine authorship maintained 

throughout. Summary of his conclusions - . 929 
Luthardt : 

His works devoted to the Johannine question. 

Results . : : : : : : ; . 326 
Godet : 

His Commentary on S. John. Conviction by impres- 

sion and by scientific study . : 3 : . 328 
Beyschlag : 

His writings. Result of his examination of Baur’s 

theory . Ξ : : 5 F Ξ : . 929 
Zahn : 

His independence. The History of the Canon. The 

Fourth Gospel : . ; : . 330 


Franke : 

His Old Testament in John. Scope of work. Johan- 
nine type of doctrine. Form of the writing. 
The author a Hebrew-speaking Jew of the first 
century . - ; : > ; 5 : . 332 


CONTENTS: XXXIll 


PAGE 
Other writers who hold the positive view : 


The value of their testimony . } ; : . 994 


Four English names reserved for special treatment : 
Character of the witnesses : 
(a) Bishop Lightfoot 
(8) Bishop Westcott 
(vy) Salmon 
(δ) Sanday . ! ὃ : A : ᾿ . 337 


Their position unnoticed by many Continental critics : 


Examples: 
(a) Bleek 
(8) Weiss 
(y) Meyer . : : ‘ : : : . 342 


Their evidence : 


Bishop Lightfoot’s: The school of 8. John in the 


second century : Σ : : : . 343 
Bishop Westcott’s : Internal evidence. External evi- 
dence. All evidence points in one direction . . 345 


Salmon’s: The Gospel and First Epistle by the 
same writer. Date. External evidence. Conditions 


of authorship met only by S. John . : : . 346 
Sanday’s: Advance of positive evidence. Internal 
evidence. One key only fits the wards . . 348 


CONCLUSION : 


Personality. Anonymity 
Evidence largely a question of reputation 
Requisites in a witness ὰ ν : : : . 390 


XXXIV CONTENTS. 


LECTURE VII. 


Therefore every scribe who hath been made a disciple to the kingdom 
of heaven is like wnto a man that is a householder, which bringeth forth 
out of his treasure things new and old.—Matt. xiii. 52. 


PAGE 
I. Discovertes oF ‘Our AGE.’ 


Statement of subject. Width of inquiry . } . 357 


A. Villemain’s search expedition. Discoveries of Mynas. 
The Philosophumena edited by Miller. ; . 359 


Discussion of the authorship : 
Views held by : 

(a) Jacobi 
(8) Duncker and Schneidewin 
(y) Bunsen 
(5) Lommatzsch 
(ec) Von Dollinger 
(¢) Cruice 
(η) Baur and Fessler 

Consensus of opinion in favour of Hippolytus . . 361 


Importance of the discovery 
Which is the true Basilides ? 
Critics generally prefer Hippolytus. Exceptions. 
Opinions of : 
(a) Hort 
(8) Renan 


This conclusion independent of any view of the Fourth 
Gospel . : : , ; : . : . 364 


But this Basilides contains clear quotations from the 
Gospel. Meaning of φησίν. 
Critical opinions of : 
(a) Bunsen 
(8) Keim 
(y) Renan 
(5) Arnold . ; : : ὶ ; : . 368 


εἶ 


CONTENTS. XXXV 


PAGE 
B. The Clementine Homilies : 


Dressel’s discovery. Quotation now admitted on all 
sides. Zeller’s unfortunate assertion. : - 373 


C. Tatian’s Diatessaron : 
The modern discovery 
Reference to the work by 
(a) Eusebius 
(8) Epiphanius 
Not known in the Western Church . : Ἷ . 375 
Known in the Syrian Church and written in Syriac 
Homilies of Aphrahat 
Doctrine of Addar 
Theodoret 
Bar-Salibi 
The Mechitarist Fathers 
Mosinger 
Ezra Abbot 
Wace 
Zahn’s restoration of the text 
Older than the Curetonian Syriac 
Result stated by Harnack 
Arabic MSS. in the Vatican and in Egypt, edited by 
Ciasca 
Importance of the discovery : : : : . 980 


D. The Martyrdom of Polycarp : 
Older view a.p. 167. The key 
Usher, Pearson and others 
Letronne and Borghesi 
Waddington decides for Feb. 23, a.p. 155 
General acceptance of this result 
Bishop Lightfoot’s investigations confirm it 
Importance of this date. : A : : . 387 


E. The Heads agaist Caius : 
Commentary of Bar-Salibi 


Gwynn on Hippolytus and Caius. Both accepted 
the Fourth Gospel . : : : : : . 392 


ΧΧΧΥῚ CONTENTS. 


PAGE 
F. No discoveries oppose the Johannine authorship 
Fragments of Papias do not oppose but support it 
Weight of this negative proof. : 4 : . 393 
II. RerNveEstTIGATION oF MATERIALS. 
A. The Ignatian Epistles : 
Bishop Lightfoot convinced on investigation 
Zahn’s statement of the change. Result 
Still fresh materials confirm the view 
Harnack’s judgment 
Date of the Epistles 
Johannine quotations about a.p. 110 
Other contemporary writings . : : : . 395 


B. Epistle of Polycarp: 


Harnack’s view 

Importance of the Letter 

Silence of Eusebius 

Syriac version of Eusebius. Cureton. Dindorf. 
Wright 

Armenian version. Merx 

Syriac Apology ἃ ‘ 4 : : : . 402 


CONCLUSION : 


No body of negative criticism which is not self- 
destructive 


The positive is to the negative criticism as }=oc 
Suggestions of author other than S. John, valueless 
The river of the past strengthened in the present . 409 


CONTENTS. XXXVll 


LECTURE VIII. 


Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of his 
disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written, 
that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and 
that believing ye may have life in his name.—John xx. 30, 31. 


PAGE 
I. Resutts From EARLIER LECTURES. 
The ‘judgment of centuries’ confirmed by ‘our age.’ 
The Fourth Gospel accepted as the Gospel according 
to 8. John 
Inspiration is of the essence, not of the form 
The vessel is not, the contents are, divine . : . 417 
II. Tuis Discussion NOT MERELY AN Apologia. 
The Fourth Gospel the treasure of humanity 
Danger of missing it ; : 4 A : . 419 
III. Dirrerent Forms OF THE ONE GOSPEL. 
Such differences necessary in a Revelation from God 
to man 
Fundamental differences between the Fourth Gospel 
and the Synoptics 
This expressed by : 
(a) Bretschneider 
(8) Renan . : : ὃ : - . 421 
IV. Tue FourtuH ΟὌΌΒΞΡΕΙ, 18 A TENDENCY-WRITING, AND CLAIMS 
TO BE SO. 
The three-fold purpose stated. Baur 
Difference in form admitted. Details not essential 
and may be here passed over. The difference as a 
whole is essential, and therefore the subject of 
inquiry . : 4 ; : : : : . 422 


VY. Tue Key To THE Form OF THE GOSPEL LIES IN Translation, 
WHICH IS NECESSARY TO THE JOHANNINE AUTHORSHIP. 


A. Realization of the Apostle’s position: . : . 426 


XX XVII CONTENTS. 


PAGE 


Life in Ephesus : 
(a) The Church 
(8) The concourse of peoples 


(y) The sects of philosophy. The East. The 
West. Philo. The cult of Diana 


(δ) The city 


The Apostle’s work and teaching. The close of life. 
Natural desire fora record. : : Ξ . 427 


B. The traditional account of the origin of the Gospel : 


The circle of disciples and friends 
᾿ς The work, if Johannine, necessarily Ephesian 
Example: The doctrine of the Logos. ; . 438 


C. Translation explains the uniform tone of thought and 
expression, and the opposing views of critics : 


No human view expresses the fulness of the Divine . 442 


VI. TRANSLATION A QUESTION FOR ALL TIME. 
The problem of to-day 
A nineteenth-century Ephesus 
Relation of Universities to this problem 


Army waiting for leaders. Difficulty of the task. 
Only leaders can lead. Leaders must lead. . 444 


VII. Practica, Hints ror YouNGER HEARERS. 


A. Characteristics of present-day thought: Law and prin- 
ciple. Scientific laws not ultimate : ‘ . 458 


B. The Fourth Gospel and our present ‘laws’ : 


No plea for the temporary expressions of theology 
or science : ‘ ; : 2 : : . 456 


The immensity of nature. The ultimate explana- 
tion. Scientific leaders have no word to speak : 
(a) Herbert Spencer 
(8) Tyndall 
(y) Darwin 
(δ) Clifford 
(©) Asa Gray 3 ; ; : ‘ , . 458 


CONTENTS. XX XIX 


PAGE 
‘Origination’ the essential thing 


Answer of the Fourth Gospel 


The Incarnation the only explanation of existence . 460 


C. Modern ethical science : 


The categorical imperative 

Illustrations in modern University life and work 

The true principle. Illustrations 

The shadow of Christ. Altruism : : : . 401 


D. Agnosticism : 
Its attractiveness. Reasons 
(a) Modern use of term 
(8) S. Paul’s 
(y) 5. John’s ; F : : : : . 465 


Intellectual agnosticism necessarily true 
Conclusion without premises. Examples 
Agnosticism is the assertion of faith 


The Fourth Gospel is a Gospel of faith, and appeals 
to the faculty of faith 


Lessons for the individual . : 2 : ᾿ 207 


9 4 o vs ol aaa 


Py. ἔν Aptis Pash Ae 
ee ΠΕΡ ἌΚΡΟΝ ᾿ on: ΝΕ 
Ax ake τεὸς 
Υ ἜΡΟΝ Ψ Δι ΠΕ 
‘Pe 
ἐν ("- hie E ot 


ee, 59 Lv dist 


HECTUBE ἢ 


THE ‘JUDGMENT OF CENTURIES’ 


THE SECOND CENTURY: THIRD GENERATION 


‘IL FAUT SAVOIR DOUTER OU IL FAUT, ASSURER OU IL FAUT, ET SE 
SOUMETTRE OU IL FAUT; QUI NE FAIT AINSI N'ENTEND PAS LA FORCE 
DE LA RAISON. 


Pascal. 


LECTURE LI. 


For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth. 
2 Cor, xii 8: 


THE subject on which I propose to speak in the 
present course of lectures is ‘ Modern Criticism.’ It 
was suggested by a remark of the late Dr. Keim, 
which expresses, in the deliberate words of a man 
who was as reverent as he was learned, the conviction 
that ‘Our age has cancelled the judgment of cen- 
turies.’' Others have expressed and have accepted, 
sometimes with httle reverence and with little learn- 
ing, similar opinions; and there has grown up 
around us—in the drawing-room, indeed, rather than 
in the lecture-room, in the magazine and in the novel, 
rather than in the serious and responsible treatise, in 
the characters of fiction and of anonymous writers, 
rather than in the persons of scholars of established 
reputation—a method of thinking, or at least of say- 
ing, that these opinions are ascertained truths which 

must with fuller knowledge gain general acceptance. 
Dr. Keim’s statement was made with special 
reference to the Fourth Gospel ; and for this reason, 
1 “Ks ist unser Jahrhundert, Jesu von Nazara, 1867, i. pp. 103 


welches das Urtheil der Jahr- sq. English Translation, 1879, i. 
hunderte kassirt hat.’ Geschichte’ p. 142. 


Introduc- 
tion. The 
subject 
stated : 


Modern 
criticism 


and the 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Divisions 
of the 
subject: 


The‘ judg- 
ment of 
centuries,’ 


4 LECTURE I. 


as well as because the Fourth Gospel has been made 
the central position upon which the forces of modern 
criticism have been directed, and because it stands 
out pre-eminently among the treasures of the New 
Testament writings, I propose to confine our atten- 
tion to this chief problem of present-day thought. 
Thus limited, our subject becomes ‘ Modern Criticism 
considered in its relation to the Fourth Gospel.’ 
Further limitations will be imposed by the scope of 
this course of ‘ lecture-sermons,’ and it will be found 
necessary, in order that your patience may not be 
unduly taxed, to add in notes, details and refer- 
ences in support of the principles which will be 
submitted. 

The method of examination is marked out for 
us in the terms of the subject. The first step will 
be to ascertain what, as a matter of fact, the ‘judg- 
ment of centuries’ on the Fourth Gospel is. With 
this end in view, the dawn of real knowledge in 
the last quarter of the second century will be a 
convenient starting-point, from which we may look 
backwards into the twilight of the preceding decades, 
and forwards into the history of sixteen centuries. 
Three short lectures will not allow us to take more 
than the most cursory review of these periods ; but 
of the time at our command this may be considered 
a sufficient proportion. It will be the less necessary 
for us to enter into fuller detail, as the position of 
the Fourth Gospel in the second century has been 
the subject of much recent examination; and the 


LECTURE I. 5 


history of the sixteen centuries which follow is for 
the most part a history of unquestioned acceptance. 

After arriving at an estimate of what the ‘judg- 
ment of centuries’ is, we shall be in a position to 
inquire how far ‘our age’ has cancelled it. For the 
purpose of this inquiry, and with the limits laid 
down for it, ‘our age’ dates from the close of the 
last century ; and I propose to devote two lectures 
to an examination of the negative positions which 
have been asserted during this period. The names 
Evanson, Bretschneider, Strauss, Baur, Hase, Weisse, 
Ritschl, Keim, Scholten, Loman, Renan, will for the 
present sufficiently indicate the course which this 
examination is intended to take ; and it will probably 
be found convenient to make the divisions which are 
demanded by a system of lectures, so as in the 
fourth lecture to take the period from Evanson to 
Strauss, and in the fifth, the work of Baur with the 
school which this master created. One lecture, at 
least, must be given to a brief sketch of the work of 
positive criticism, and one to the additions which have 
been made to our actual knowledge by the discovery 
and investigation of MSS. and other fresh materials. 
An opportunity will then be left for a concluding 
lecture, in which we may consider the influence 
which modern thought should have on our concep- 
tions of the Fourth Gospel. 

Many who hear me will know well, that the 
plan which is thus roughly marked out embraces a 
wide field of inquiry, in which views, differing from 


‘ Our age.’ 


Width of 
inquiry. 


Tone of 
discus- 
sion : 


6 LECTURE 1. 


each other by every degree of difference, and crossing 
each other at every conceivable angle, have been put 
forward with the claim for each that it alone could 
represent the truth. Some writers, indeed, have 
looked so exclusively to the origin of their own 
theories, and along the line of their own investi- 
gations, as to believe not only that all other theories 
and results are wrong, but that their authors must 
have been blinded by prejudice, or have even con- 
sciously and deliberately chosen error. Now con- 
traries may both be wrong, and of contradictories one 
cannot be right; but it does not follow that the 
holder of either one or the other is not perfectly 
sincere. From a man’s antecedents and position we 
may know what general value to put upon his 
judgment, and may in special cases feel bound to 
discount it ; but we have no right to impute motives 
to him, or to brand him with names which he would 
be unwilling to apply to himself. We have heard 
more than enough—and painful has it been to hear— 
of ‘counsels for creeds,’ of ‘ ecclesiastical bigotry,’ of 
‘professional convictions.’ ‘Mr. Wendover,’ it will 
be remembered, ‘in spite of his philosophy, had never 
been proof all his life against an anti-clerical instinct 
worthy almost of a Paris municipal councillor.’? We 
have heard also more than enough—and painful indeed 
has it been to hear—of ‘advocates of atheism,’ of ‘criti- 
cism made subservient to party,’ of ‘light rejected in 
the interests of darkness.’ A divine Judge speaking 
? Robert Elsmere, vol. ii. p. 243. 


LECTURE I. Ἶ 


with the certainty of omniscience can say, ‘ Ye love 
darkness rather than light, because your deedsare evil ;’ 
but human ignorance should judge no man. Human 
charity will believe all things, and even when it 
cannot believe, will hope all things ; and if there is 
no room left even for hope, it will endure all things. 
But in our own generation it has strangely come 
to pass, that in questions of biblical and theological 
knowledge, one who holds the views which have 
been held, and are held, by mankind at large, especi- 


ally if he holds them so strongly that he thinks it. 


his duty to give up all else that he may teach them, 
and if he has devoted the best years of his life and 
the best thoughts of his mind to the study of them, 
is supposed to be zpso facto disqualified to judge of 
them. A truth is thought to be less certainly true 
because it is held by a man who is ready, if need be, 
to die for it, or—and the martyrdom is far more real 
—is ready to live for it; while a man is often 
supposed to be specially qualified to judge of alleged 
truths which he has hardly examined, because he 
thinks them a priorz to be impossible, or because he 
has attained eminence in a wholly distinct region of 
inquiry.” To deny that a miracle has happened or 
can happen—that is, to deny that there is a divine 
Being, or that He has revealed or can reveal Him- 
self to man—is a strange qualification, but it has been 
widely accepted as a real one, by which a man is 
fitted to judge without bias, of the authenticity or 


$ See opinion of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Lecture VI. p. 298. 


Anti-theo- 
logical 
prejudice. 


M. Renan. 


Mental 
achroma- 
tism. 


ὃ LECTURE I 


historic truth of a writing which asserts that miracles 
have occurred, and that God has revealed Himself to 
man. ‘To have held, and to have ceased to hold, a 
public position as a teacher in the Christian Church, 
to have passed through all the throes of a crisis in 
faith, is a strange qualification by which a man is 
fitted to judge, without feeling or prejudice, of the 
new and fuller evidence of one of the sacred writings 
of the Church ; but this is the position of many of 
the leaders of the negative criticism with which we 
shall have to deal—the position of Evanson, of 
Strauss, of M. Renan, of Dr. Davidson. 

M. Renan tells us, in a well-known passage, how 
he had learnt from Descartes 
that the first condition for discovering truth is to be free from 
all party. The eye must be completely achromatic if it is to 
find truth in philosophy or politics or morals.* 

But is the eye completely achromatic to be 
attained ? Is not the extreme delicacy of the optic 
organs in danger of being injured in the effort 
to attain it? Has not blindness rather than 
clearness of vision been sometimes the result ? If 
complete mental achromatism, in despite of all laws 
of heredity and environment, were attainable, would 
those who could attain it be better fitted to see truth, 
or is the pure light of truth the result of the harmony 
of complex views, as the pure light of physical 
vision is the harmony of all the colours of the rain- 
bow ? Has the eye of the animal world, in all the 

“ Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse, 1883, p. 285. 


LECTURE I. 9 


gradations of genera and species, in all the width 
and variety of time, place, climate, light, atmosphere, 
temperature, been adapted to the exact object of its 
vision, and has the mental eye, in similar width and 
variety of conditions, been adapted not to clearness 
but to confusion, not to truth but to prejudice ? Has 
it come to be that the primary condition of seeing 
truth in this nineteenth century is to break with all 
the training of the past, to declare the years of child- 
hood and receptivity, the years of youth and educa- 
tion, the existence of schools and universities, a fatal 
mistake in the economy of the human race? [5 the 
untrained eye of the untutored savage more to be 
trusted in the use of the complicated instruments of 
our modern knowledge, than the skilled eye of the 
observatory or the museum? ‘That M. Renan does 
not mean this, is clear from more than one passage 
of his writings. In the preface to the book from 
which I have quoted, for example, he asserts that 
The true men of progress are those who have for their start- 
ing point a profound respect for the past.° 

That his own effort to secure the achromatic eye 
which can find truth, is not an example that would 
induce us to follow him, is seen from the fact that, 
upon the subject of our present thoughts, he has in 
different works, and in different editions of the same 
work, so often changed his opinion, that one is 
tempted to think that the mind may itself indeed 
be colourless, but, like the chameleon, assuming 


5 Souvenirs, ut supra, Preface, p. xxii. 


This 
achroma- 
tism im- 
possible : 


Sir James 
Mack- 
intosh, 


10 LECTURE I. 


the colour of the tree upon which it is for the 
moment resting. That the attempt to divest the 
mind of every tinge of feeling, to make it necessary 
to scoop out the emotions before admission to the 
order of critics, as it was necessary to pluck out 
the will before admission to the order of Jesuits, 
may result in paralysis of the muscles of our moral 
nature, and unman the man who is trying to be 
manly, appears from such words as the following :— 

For myself, when people deny these fundamental dogmas, 
I have a strong desire to believe them; when they affirm 
them, unless it be in good verse, I am seized with invincible 
doubt.® 
But that the attainment of the purely achromatic 
mental eye is as a matter of fact impossible, is a 
commonplace of every-day life which is illustrated 
in the whole history of literature. I take some in- 
stances from English books which happen to lie close 
to my hand; and if I devote what may seem an 
undue proportion of our time to this part of the sub- 
ject, it is because it lies at the root not only of the 
present lecture, but also of those which are to 
follow. 

Sir James Mackintosh is ordinarily supposed to 
be a philosophical historian of calm and excellent 
judgment. He has occasion to refer to the works 
of Sir Henry Vane, and does so in the following 
terms :— 


* Séance de VAcadémie Fran- de M. Pasteur. Réponse de M. 
φαῖδε du 27 Avril 1882. Discours Renan, p. 41. 


LECTURE: I. 11 


Sir Henry Vane was one of the most profound minds 
that ever existed, not inferior, perhaps, to Bacon. His works 
which are theological display astonishing powers. They are 
remarkable as containing the first direct assertion of liberty 
of conscience.’ 


Sir Henry Vane, when seen through the mind of 
the historian David Hume, appears in the light 
which follows :— 


This man, so celebrated for his parliamentary talents, and 
for his capacity in business, has left some writings behind 
him: They treat, all of them, of religious subjects, and are 
absolutely unintelligible: No traces of eloquence, or even of 
common sense, appear in them. A strange paradox! did we 
not know, that men of the greatest genius, where they relin- 
quish by principle the use of their reason, are only enabled, 
by their vigour of mind, to work themselves the deeper into 
error and absurdity.® 


It is a little difficult to realize that it is the same 
man and the same works; and yet Sir James 
Mackintosh proposed to continue the ‘ History of 
England by David Hume.’ 

This example is from Dr. Hawkesworth’s Ad- 
venturer :-— 


Two men examining the same question proceed commonly 
like the physician and gardener in selecting herbs, or the 
farmer and hero looking on the plain; they bring minds 
impressed with different motions, and direct their inquiries 


7 North American Review, Oct. Cromwell, ii. p. 6. Hosmer, Life 
1832 ; Report by A. H. Everett of young Sir Henry Vane, 1888, 
of a conversation between him- pp. 492 sq. 
self and Mackintosh in London, 8 History of Great Britain, 
in 1817. Cf. Carlyle’s deprecia- 1757, ii. 152. 
tory estimate of Vane in his 


David 
Hume, 


The Ad- 
venturer, 


‘ Cowardly 
Agnosti- 
cism,’ 


Mr. Mark 
Pattison, 


12 LECTURE I. 


to different ends; they form, therefore, contrary conclusions, 
and each wonders at the other’s absurdity.® 

This is the conclusion of a recent essay on what 
the writer calls ‘Cowardly Agnosticism’ :—_ 

I have now gone through the whole case for duty and for 
religion, as stated by the Agnostic school, and have shown 
that, as thus stated, there is no case at all. I have shown 
their arguments to be so shallow, so irrelevant, and so con- 
tradictory, that they never could have imposed themselves on 
the men who condescend to use them, if these men, upon 
utterly alien grounds, had not pledged themselves to the con- 
clusion which they invoke the arguments to support.! 

The late Mr. Mark Pattison stood before us as 
the very ideal of a man who had snapped asunder 
every fetter of prejudice. We had forgotten, until 
we were lately reminded of it, that he was the trans- 
lator of Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea on ὃ. 
Matthew’s Gospel,” and that he at one time lived in 
terror of what would become of him if he died out- 
side the pale of the church of Rome.*? To some of us 
at least he seemed to move in a higher atmosphere of 
calm and severe reason, and had Oxford men been 
asked to think of one who had attained the achromatic 
mental eye, his name would have come unbidden 
to many minds; but this is how his collected 
Essays strike a really able reviewer, whose right to 
speak can hardly be unknown :— 

If he fails, as he often seems to us to do, in the justice 


and balance of his appreciation of the phenomena before him, 


° Adventurer, No. 107, Nov. Review, April 1889, p. 551. 
13, 1753. * Oxford, 1841. 
' W. H. Mallock, Fortnightly 5. Memoirs, 1885, pp. 221-2. 


LECTURE 1. 13: 


if his statements and generalisations are crude and extrava- 
gant, it is that passion and deep aversions have overpowered 
the natural accuracy of his faculty of judgment. ... We 
hear of people being spoilt by their prepossessions, their 
party, their prejudices, the necessities of their political and 
ecclesiastical position. Mr, Pattison is a warning that a 
man may claim the utmost independence, and yet be maimed 
in his power of being just and reasonable by other things 
than party.* 

While this reviewer was writing these words, an- 
other was writing on the Great Missionary Success as 
follows :— 

‘Les préjugés,’ it has been said, ‘sont la défroque des 
gens d’esprit, and, indeed, prejudices, judging by the 
general unwillingness to part from them, even when they are 
quite worn out, seem to be as comfortable wear as old 
clothes. With all of us, the accidents of early association, 
the chances of relationship, are sufficient to make us accept 
unquestioningly and hold tenaciously opinions for which we 
have not the shghtest ground.° 

Yes : Pope is right— 

‘Tis with our judgments as our watches, none 
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.® 


Dean Stanley, in his essay on Zhe Creed of the 
Early Christians, introduces a series of quotations 
the matter of which does not affect the present ques- 
tion, with the following formule : 


It is not the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, it is 
Matthew Arnold, who afirms,— 


4 Guardian, May 1, 1889, p. wiew, May 1889, p. 677. 
685. δ. Hssay on Criticism, part i. 
Ὁ Lady Dilke, Fortnightly Re- lines 9, 10. 


Lkort- 
nightly 


Revien, 


Pope. 


Friendly 
and ad- 
verse 
witness: 


Dean 
Stanley. 


14 LECTURE I. 


It is not Bishop Lightfoot, it is the author of ‘ Super- 
natural Religion,’ who asserts,— 


It is not Lord Shaftesbury, it is the author of ‘ Ecce 
Homo,’ who says,— 


It is no Bampton lecturer, it is John Stuart Mill, who 
says,— 


It is not Lacordaire, it is Renan, who affirms,—‘ 


Now these formule show that the force of a 
statement was in the opinion of Dean Stanley the 
stronger, because it was not made by a person who 
would naturally have been expected to make it, but 
by one whose general habit of thought was in the 
opposite direction, and by whom the opposite would 
have been stated, if it could have been stated by any- 
one.® And no one questions that in a large degree it 
is so; but the superior validity of evidence which 
arises simply from the fact that it comes from an 
adverse witness, may be more than balanced by the 
superior knowledge of a friendly witness, or by his 
consciousness of the enormous stake which is at issue 
both for others and for himself, and his consequent 
painful anxiety to state the truth, the whole truth, 
and nothing but the truth. Few who have followed 
the whole course of the controversy will be prepared 
to admit, that a statement favourable to Christianity 
would, if made by the author of Supernatural Reli- 


* Christian Institutions, 1882, δ. Cf. Whateley, Elements of 
cap. Xiv. pp. 273 sq. Rhetoric, 1846, ed. 7, p. 64. 


LECTURE I. 19 


gion, be stronger than one made by Bishop Light- 
foot. The real question which lies at the root of an 
inquiry such as we are undertaking is, Are we in the 
spirit of our text, and without influence of purpose 
or fear of result, seekers after truth? Do we plead 
as advocates, or weigh evidence as judges? An 
advocate is from his very position one-sided ; a judge 
should be impartial: an advocate will present and 
make prominent all the facts and arguments which 
tell in favour of his own contention, and will sup- 
press or keep in the background, as far as he 
honourably can, all which are opposed to it; a 
judge should take care that the facts on both sides 
are equally present to his mind, and that nothing 
which is important to the result shall be passed over 
or unfairly dealt with. Now no one who realizes the 
true issues in any question which affects Christianity, 
or the position of one of its sacred books, could pos- 
sibly assume the character of an advocate unless it 
were for the purpose of establishing the truth. I 
shall not venture to state at this moment, but I hope 
the statement will assert itself before these lectures 
shall be concluded, that a Bampton Lecturer, if 
indeed an advocate, is one who pleads in the temple 
of truth, and before a Judge to Whom the secrets of 
the thoughts of the heart are known. ‘ We can do 
nothing against the truth, but for the truth.’ He 
has perhaps little right to complain if he is some- 
times supposed to be merely ‘a counsel for creeds.’ 
The conclusions at which his investigations will 


Advocate 
or judge? 


Position of 
a Bampton 
Lecturer. 


16 LECTURE I. 


arrive are more or less fully known before they 
are completed. If they are not such as can be with 
propriety expressed in ‘ Divinity Lecture Sermons,’ 
in accord with ‘the last will and testament of the 
late Rev. John Bampton,’ he has no right to deliver 
them on this Foundation. But he may urge, that 
no man is compelled to be Bampton Lecturer, and 
that no man would accept the office if the honest 
results of his own investigations were not in accord- 
ance with the conditions imposed. It is indeed con- 
ceivable that the more complete examination of his 
subject may lead him to conclusions which are incon- 
sistent with the will of the Founder, but in that case 
his duty would be clear. Upon the altar of truth 
everything must be sacrificed: traditional beliefs, 
friendships, office, position, prospects, everything. 
Sacrificed? Yes; but it is only in the sacrifice that 
the offerer knows what the chief blessing of life really 
is. Sacrificed? Yes; but ‘the truth shall make you 
free ᾿ :— 

Truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth, that the 
Inquiry of Truth, which is the Love-making or Wooing of it ; 
the Knowledge of 7’ruth, which is the Presence of it ; and the 
Belief of V’ruth, which is the enjoying of it; is the Sovereign 
Good of human Nature.’ 


I make no claim then to enter upon my subject 
without definite convictions upon it, nor do I claim 
freedom from the bias which necessarily accompanies 
definite convictions, and from which I believe no 


9. Bacon’s Essays : 1, Of Truth. 


»- 


LECTURE I. ΠῚ 


man, and least of all the discoverer of a new theory, 
or the possessor of the completely achromatic eye, 
to be free; but I claim nevertheless to enter upon 
it with the one purpose of seeking the truth, and 
helping my younger brethren to seek it :— 


Aufrichtig zu seyn kann ich versprechen: unparteiisch 
zu seyn aber nicht.! 


The first question which has been marked out for 
inquiry is the evidence for the reception of the Fourth 
Gospel which is furnished by the second century ; 
and in examining a question which is admittedly 
made difficult by the scantiness of the remnants of 
literature which have come down to us, it will be 
simpler to pass from the more known to the less 
known, and to trace the lines of investigation back- 
wards. ‘The main lines have during these later years 
been sufficiently disclosed by the labours of many 
eminent scholars, prominent among whom are Bishop 
Lightfoot and our own Professor of Exegesis, the 
Cambridge Professors Westcott and Hort, and the 
Cambridge editor of Ireneus the late Mr. Wigan 
Harvey, Dr. Salmon of Dublin, Dr. Charteris of 
Edinburgh, the too little known and too early lost 
Dr. Ezra Abbot of Harvard ; and, on the Continent, 
Drs. Baur, Credner, Schweeler, Von Otto, Oehler, 
Ronsch, Hilgenfeld, Schiirer, Weizsiicker, Lipsius, 
Zahn, and Harnack. But almost every day sheds 
its new side-lights on these investigations, and of 


1 Goethe, Ethisches, 3te Abtheil, 


Evidence 
of the 
second 
century : 


The third 
genera- 
tion: 


Church of 
Lyons: 


Irenzus, 


fl.174-189. 


His work 
against 
Gnosti- 
cism. 


18 LECTURE I. 


some of them I hope to speak in a future lecture. 
For our immediate purpose it will be sufficient to deal 
with the main facts in the presence of these lights ; 
and the facts may be conveniently grouped in three 
periods, corresponding with the three generations of 
human life at the end, the middle, and the beginning 
of the century. 


We will, in the first place, then, inquire of the 
generation which lived towards the close of the 
second century. 


Irenzeus is the most important person in the 
literary history of the Gospels. He stands at the 
very dawn of the period when this history emerged 
from twilight into clear day ; and it is as certain that 
the Fourth Gospel existed in substantially the same 
form as that in which we now possess it, in the days 
of Irenzeus, as that it exists in our present English 
Bibles) We know moreover without doubt that 
Irenzeus succeeded the venerable Pothinus in the 
episcopal see of Lyons in the year Α.Ὁ. 177 or 178. 
His great work? against Gnosticism was probably 
written during the early years of his episcopate, about 
A.D. 180-185. The five books of which the work 
is composed were not all issued at the same time ; but 
the date of the third book, which is our most impor- 
tant witness, is roughly fixed by the statement that 


* "EXeyxos καὶ ἀνατροτὴ τῆς Πρὸς τὰς αἱρέσεις, Contra Hereses, 
ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως Which is com- ΟἹ κατὰ αἱρέσεων, Adversus Hereses 
monly quoted by the shorter title or Adversus Hereticos. 


LECTURE 1. 19 


Eleutherus, the twelfth from the Apostles, was then 
bishop of Rome. It was in any case therefore not 
later than a.p. 189, and not earlier than Α.Ὁ. 174 or 
175. 

Now in this third book, Irenzus not only 
quotes largely from the Fourth Gospel as he does else- 
where, but he also tells us in the most definite terms 
that John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned 


His use of 
the Fourth 
Gospel. 


on His breast, put forth his Gospel while he abode in , 


Ephesus in Asia ;* that in the course of preaching 
this faith, John, the disciple of the Lord, being 
desirous by the preaching of the Gospel to remove 
the error which Cerinthus had been sowing among 
men, and long before him those who are called Nico- 
laitans® .... began the instruction which his Gospel 
contains ; that the school of Valentinus made very 
full use of the Gospel of John, and were from that 
very Gospel shown to be wholly in error ;° and he 
seeks to demonstrate by the fanciful analogy with the 
four regions and the four winds and the four faces 
of the Cherubim, the four forms of the living crea- 
tures,’ the four covenants, that there could be only 
four Gospels; and that the Gospel according to 
S. John, which he places first in order, answers to 
the character of the lion, which ‘is the first living 


3 Cf. Lipsius, Chronologie der natwral Religion, pp. 260 sqq. 
Rémischen Bischéfe, pp. 184 sqq. ; 4 Adv. Her. lib. iii. cap. i. §1; 
article Irenews in Smith and ed. Harvey, tom. ii. p. 6. 

Wace’s Dictionary of Christian 5 Ibid. cap. x. § 1; ibid. p. 40. 
Biography, iii. pp. 253 sqq. ; and ὁ [bid. cap. xi. § 7 ; ibid. p. 46. 
Bishop Lightfoot, Hssays on Super- 7 ‘Rev. ty..2. 


c 2 


Church of 
Alexan- 
dria: 
Clement, 
f1.190-203. 
His origin, 
and 
teachers. 


His 
pupils. 


2.0) LECTURE T. 


creature, and is full of confidence, and therefore tells 
in its opening words of the princely and glorious 
birth from the Father.® 

The fact of the acceptance of the Fourth Gospel 
by Irenzeus and by both Catholics and Gnostics of his 
time, is placed then beyond any possible question. 


While Irenzus was thus presiding over the see 
of Lyons, and defending it from the Valentinian 
heresy which had invaded the valley of the Rhone, 
Titus Flavius Clemens, who was probably an Athenian 
by birth, and was widely read in the philosophy and 
literature of Greece, had passed, as he himself tells 
us,’ from his other teachers in Greece and Italy and 
Asia Minor and Palestine to his true master, last in 
order but first in power, whom he found hidden in 
Egypt. This was almost certainly Pantenus who 
was head of the catechetical school at Alexandria. 
Clement became under his influence a presbyter, 
and, after probably acting for a time as his assist- 
ant, succeeded him, and was eminent as the great 
Alexandrian teacher for a period which cannot be 
determined with certainty, but probably rather more 
than covered the last decade of the second century. 
Origen was among his distinguished pupils, and per- 
haps Hippolytus learned of him as well as of Irenzeus. 
Now Clement naturally asks no question and has no 
doubt about the Fourth Gospel. He names the series 

® Loc. cit. cap. xi. § 8; utsupra, Klotz, tom. ii. p. 9. Cf. Eusebius, 


pp. 47 sq. Hist. Eccles. v. 11. 
* Stromateis, i. 1. § 11; ed. 


LECTURE I. y) 


and nationality of his teachers in order to lay stress 
upon the fact, that these men ‘ preserved the tradition 
of doctrine directly from the holy Apostles Peter, 
James, John, and Paul, son receiving it from father 
—though few were like their fathers—until by God’s 
will the seeds of truth from ancestors and Apostles 
came unto them.’! He tells us again how John, 
writing after the other Evangelists, and perceiving 
that the external facts had been set forth by them, 
being divinely influenced by the Spirit and encouraged 
by his friends, composed a spiritual Gospel.? In 
another place Clement declines to give credence to an 
apocryphal statement which was made on the autho- 
rity of the gospel of the Egyptians—and the passage 
is of wider importance in the history of the Canon 
and in the question of Clement’s use of apocryphal 
writings, than the inference which we are now de- 
riving from it—on the definite ground that it was 
not to be found in the four Gospels which had been 
handed down.° 

The well-known story of John and the youth who 
was captured by the robber band, is introduced by 
the statement that it is a story, or rather that it is a 
real record of John the Apostle, which was preserved 
in the memory and handed down; and that the 
Apostle, after the death of the tyrant, had returned 
from Patmos to Ephesus, and had gone to the heathen 
regions in the neighbourhood, here appointing bishops, 


' Stromateis, ut supra. 5 Stromateis, iii. 18, ὃ 95; ed. 
2 Kuseb. Hist. Eccles. vi. 14. Klotz, tom. 11. p. 266. 


John and 
the ‘ spiri- 
tual 
Gospel.’ 


Churches 
of Rome 
and Car- 
thage: 


Tertullian, 
c. 150-240. 


His posi- 
tion as a 
writer. 


22 LECTURE I. 

there founding new churches, in a third place setting 
apart for the ministry those who were chosen by 
the Holy Spirit.’ 

The frequent use by Clement of individual 
passages in the Fourth Gospel is unquestioned. 
In the Exzhortation to the Heathen, he quotes each 
of the Gospels, and SS. Matthew, Luke, and John 
frequently, but he mentions only $8. John by name.° 


Tertullian is almost an unknown person, apart 
from his writings and from the impression which 
these writings have produced upon the thought and 
language of both the Church and _ individuals. 
‘Give me the 


Master,’ was the formula with which Cyprian, bishop 


But what an impression it has been! 


of Tertullian’s native town, asked for his works 
which he read daily.® ‘ What can exceed the learning, 
what the perception of Tertullian ?’ asks Jerome, and 
he finds answer to his own question: ‘ His Apology 
and his treatises against the heathen embrace all the 


erudition of the age.’* And in our own day a master 


4 Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. iii. 877. Cf. ‘Et beatus Cyprianus 


23. 

° Protreptikos, §59 ; ed. Klotz, 
tom. i. p. 52. 

® *. . . referreque sibi solitum 
nunquam Cyprianum absque Ter- 
tulliani lectione unum diem pre- 
terisse, ac sibi crebro dicere, Da 
Magistrum: Tertullianum vide- 
licet significans.’ Jerome, De Viris 
illustribus, cap. lili. ; ed. Bene- 
dict., Verona, 1735, tom. ii. p. 


Tertulliano magistro utitur, ut 
ejus scripta probant; quumque 
eruditi et ardentis viri delectetur 
ingenio, Montanum cum eo Maxi- 
millamque non sequitur.’ bid. 
tom. 1. p. 519-20. 

7 “Quid Tertulliano eruditius, 
quid acutius? Apologeticus ejus, 
et contra Gentes libri, cunctam 
sxeculi obtinent disciplinam.’ Ibid. 
tom. i. p. 427. 


IND 
(hs) 


LECTURE 1. 


of both thought and style calls him ‘the most 
powerful writer of the early centuries.’ ὃ 

We shall certainly be not far from right, if we 
place his life at from the middle of the second to 
about the third or fourth decade of the third cen- 
tury, that is from about A.p. 150 or 160 to a.p. 290-- 
240. We know further that he was born at Carthage, 
and that he was a convert from heathenism ; and his 
skill in argument, his judicial power of estimating 
evidence, and his use of legal terms, all suggest what 
is in itself likely in the case of the son of a captain of 
a Roman legion, that he was trained for official, per- 
haps legal employment. Carthage and Rome are the 
only centres in which we find traces of his life and 
work as a layman, as a presbyter, as a Catholic, as 
a Montanist. Eusebius tells us that, in addition to 
his general eminence, he was specially distinguished 
among the chief men of home ; and that his Apology, 
which was written for Roman Christians, was also 
translated into Greek.’ Tertullian himself tells us 
incidentally, when speaking of the value of gems 
depending only on their rarity, of his own presence 
at Rome.’ Jerome moreover accounts for his lapse 
to Montanism by the treatment which he received 


at the hands of the Roman clergy ;” but it was 


8 Cardinal Newman, Tracts 
Theological and EHeclesiastical, p. 
220. 

9 Hist. Eccles. ii. 2. 

"*Gemmarum quoque nobili- 
tatem vidimus Romzx de fastidio 
Parthorum et Medorum cetero- 


rumque gentilium suorum coram 
matronis erubescentem, nisi quod 
nec ad ostentationem fere haben- 
tur.’ De Cultu Feminarum, 1. 7 ; 
ed. Oehler, tom. i. p. 709. 

* ‘Hic cum usque ad mediam 
atatem presbyter Hcclesiz per- 


His train- 
ing. 


His fre- 
quent 
quotations 
from the 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Passages 
from his 
works : 


rule 
against 
heretics, 


2.4 LECTURE I. 


in Carthage that he laboured as a Montanist, and 
it was in North Africa that the ‘ Tertullianists ’ 
took their rise. 


Tertullian is then a witness speaking at once from 
the rival cities of Rome and Carthage, from the 
bosom of the Church and from the heresy of semi- 
Montanism. His writings contain constant citations 
of Holy Scripture, and a reference to a good index ὅ 
will show that there are quotations from every 
chapter, and in some chapters from almost every verse, 
of the Fourth Gospel. 

More important than these quotations are the 
passages in which Tertullian dwells on the unity and 
corporate life of the Church, and bases the reception 
of her sacred writings upon their immediate deriva- 
tion from Apostolic sources. Thus in the Demurrer 
against Heretics, he says : 


From this, therefore, we draw up a rule. If the Lord 
Jesus Christ sent forth Apostles to preach, no preachers are 
to be received except those whom Christ commissioned, be- 
cause no one has known the Father but the Son and he to 
whom the Son has revealed Him, and the Son does not seem 
to have revealed Him to any but to the Apostles whom He 
sent to preach; and of course they preached that which He 
revealed to them. But what they preached, that is what 
Christ revealed to them, can be known—and here 1 must lay . 
down a rule again—only by means of those churches which 


mansisset, invidia postea et con- bus, wt supra, cap. liii. tom. ii. 
tumeliis clericorum Roman Ee- pp. 875 sqq. 

clesie, ad Montani dogma de- δ΄ See especially the Index Scrip- 
lapsus . . . .᾽ De Viris illustri-  twrarum in Oehler’s edition. 


BSD 
Or 


LECTURE I. 


the Apostles themselves founded and themselves declared the 
Gospel to them, both vivd voce, to use a common expression, 
and afterwards by means of letters. But if this be so, it is 
also clear that all doctrine which agrees with those Apostolic 
churches which are the wombs and sources of the faith, must 
be accepted as truth, for it undoubtedly contains that which 
those churches received from Apostles, Apostles from Christ, 
and Christ from God. It follows, on the other hand, that 
all doctrine is known beforehand to be false which savours 
of contrariety to the truth of the churches, of Apostles, of 
Christ, of God. It remains, therefore, for us to show whether 
this our doctrine, the line of which we have set forth above, 
has its origin in the Apostolic tradition, and whether all others 
do not ipso facto proceed from falsehood. We have communion 
with the churches of the Apostles in that our doctrine is in no 
way different. This is the witness of truth.* 


A few pages later in the same tract, he expresses 
the same thought in these words :— 


. run through the churches of the Apostles in which the 
very thrones of the Apostles are still prominent in their 
places, in which their own authentic letters are read, so that 
the voice and face of each is recalled. You are close to 
Achaia, and there you have Corinth. Or you are not far from 
Macedonia, and there you have Philippi and the Thessalonians. 
Or you are able to go as far as Asia, and there you find 
Ephesus. Or again you are close to Italy, and there is Rome 
from whence we also have our authority at hand. Happy 
indeed is that church for which Apostles poured forth their 
whole teaching as well as their blood; where Peter suffers 
like his Lord, where Paul is crowned by a death like John’s 
[i.e. the Baptist’s], where the Apostle John, after he had been 
plunged into boiling oil and escaped unhurt, is sent back to 
his island! Let us see what this church has learned, what she 


4 De Prescriptione Hereticorwm, cap. xxi.; ed. Oehler, tom. 1]. 
p. 19. 


the 
Apostolic 
churches, 


authors of 
‘Evangeli- 
cal In- 

strument,’ 


Apostles 
handed 
down that 
which was 
from the 
beginning, 


26 LECTURE I. 


has taught, what communion she has had with our own 
churches in Africa.° 


In like manner, when replying to Marcion, 
Tertullian takes the following position :— 


We assert, to begin with, that the Evangelical Instrument® 
has for its authors Apostles, on whom this duty of proclaiming 
the Gospel has been imposed by the Lord Himself. And if 
there are also some who are Apostolic but not Apostles, these 
are not alone, but they are with Apostles and after Apostles; 
for the preaching of disciples might be suspected of some 
envying of glory if it were not supported by the authority of 
their masters—yes, by the authority of Christ, which made the 
Apostles masters. Of the Apostles then, John and Matthew 
first plant faith in us, and of Apostolic persons Luke and 
Mark renew it.’ 


A little further on in the same treatise, he sums 
up in these words :— 


If it is clear that the earlier is the truer, and that the 
earlier is that which was from the beginning, and that from 
the beginning is that which was from the Apostles; then at 
all events it will be equally clear that that is handed down 
from the Apostles which was sacred among the churches of 
the Apostles. Let us see what milk the Corinthians drew 
from 8. Paul, by what standard the Galatians were corrected, 
what the Philippians, the Thessalonians, the Ephesians read ; 
what sound the Romans give forth who are close at hand, and 
to whom both Peter and Paul left a Gospel sealed by their 
own blood. We have also the churches which are children of 
John. For though Marcion rejected his Apocalypse, still the 
order of bishops, when traced to its origin, will rest upon John 


δ De Preser. Her. cap. xxxvi.;  Testamentum. Cf. Adv. Mare. iv. 


ed. Oehler, tom. ii. pp. 33 sq. 1, ‘alterius instrumenti vel, quod 

“ Tertullian uses Instrwmentum, magis usui est dicere, testamenti.’ 

perhaps because as a legal term it 7 Adversus Marcion. iv. 2; ed. 
ἕ 3 


implies validity, as equivalent to Oehler, tom. ii. p. 162. 


LECTURE L ον 


as founder. In like manner is the noble origin of the other 
churches recognised. I say then that among them, and not 
only among those planted by Apostles, but among all churches 
which are bound together in the Christian fellowship (de 
societate sacramenti confeederantur) that Gospel of Luke which 
we most earnestly defend, has stood its ground from its first 
publication ... The same authority of the Apostolic 
churches will support the other Gospels which we have equally 
through them and according to their use. I mean the 
Gospels of John. and Matthew, while that which Mark 
published may be maintained to be Peter’s, whose inter- 
preter Mark was... . These are the summary arguments 
which we use when we do battle for the faith of the Gospel 
against heretics, maintaining both the order of time which 
sets aside the later works as belonging to forgers, and the 
authority of churches which supports the tradition of the 
Apostles; because truth necessarily precedes falsehood, and 
comes from those by whom it has been handed down.? 


Or once again, when opposing Praxeas, he speaks 
of δ. John in the following terms :— 


In what way these things were said, the Evangelist and 
beloved disciple John knew better than Praxeas.° 


From Antioch, we have similar clear and definite 
evidence. The sixth bishop of this see in succession 
from the Apvustles was Theophilus.1 He addressed 
three books on the elements of the faith to Autolycus, 
and wrote a work, Against the Heresy of Hermogenes, 
in which he uses testimony from the Revelation 
of 5. John. He also wrote some catechetical works, 
and a work of no mean order against Marcion, 

® Tertullian, Adversus Marcion. 9 Adversus Praxean, cap. XXiil. ; 


iv. 5; ed. Oehler, tom. ii. pp. ed. Oehler, tom. 11. pp. 686. 
165-7. 1 Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. iv. 20. 


the Evan- 
gelist and 
beloved 
disciple. 


Church of 
Antioch : 


Theophi- 
lus, fl. 
c. 171-185. 


His 
writings, 


testified 
to by 
Jerome 
and 


Eusebius. 


His Com- 
mentary 
on the 
Gospels 
doubtful. 


28 LECTURE I. 


all of which were preserved in the time of Eusebius, 
to whose Histury we are indebted for this description 
of them.? 

Jerome also refers to the works of Theophilus 
from personal knowledge of them,* and makes some 
We know further 
from the Chronicle of Eusebius that he stood out as a 


additions to the list in Eusebius. 


writer of literary eminence, many of whose books 
were in wide circulation.* The only one of these 
works which is now certainly extant is that addressed 
to Autolycus.’ <A lively controversy on the question 
of the Commentary on the Gospels attributed to Theo- 
philus, to which I refer only to pass over it, has 
engaged the powers of Professors Zahn and Harnack, 
the former earnestly maintaining, and the latter not 
less earnestly denying, the genuineness and authenti- 


city of the writing.® Dr. Zahn returns to the battle 


2 Hist. Eccles. iv. 24. 

3 De Vir. illust. cap. xxv.; ut 
supra, tom. 11. p. 853-4. 

+ Eusebius, Chron. ad ann. ix. 
Marcus Aurelius— 

᾿Αντιοχείας ἕκτος ἐπίσκοπος Θεύό- 
φιλὸος ἔτη ιγ΄. 
συγγράμματα διάφορά εἰσι καὶ φέ- 
ρονται. Sync. 665, 21. 

‘Antiochenorum ecclesiz vi 
episcopus constitutus est Theo- 
philus, cuius multi libri hucusque 
circumferuntur.’ Versio Armenia. 

‘Antiochenze vi episcopus ordi- 
natur Theophilus, cuius plurima 


Θεοφίλου τούτου 


ingenii opera extant.’ Husebi 
Chronicorum Canonwm. Alfred 


Schoene, Berolini, 1866, tom. ii. 


pp. 170-1. 

° Ad Autolycum. It has been 
excellently edited by Von Otto, 
and forms the eighth volume of 
the Corpus Apologetarum Chris- 
tianorum sexculi secundi. The 
prolegomena give full information 
about the works of Theophilus. 
Cf. Donaldson, History of Chiris- 
tian Literature, vol. 111. pp. 63 
sqq. ; and the interesting article 
by Canon Venables in Smith and 
Wace’s Dictionary of Christian 
Biography, iv. pp. 993 sqq. 

ὁ Zahn, Forschungen, 1885-4, 
2 Theil, 3 Theil, Beilage 111. ; Von 
Gebhardt und Harnack, J'exte w. 
Untersuchungen, Bd. i. Heft 1, 2, 


LECTURE. I. 29 


in his History of the Canon of the New Testament 
which is now being published,’ and the last word has 
not yet been spoken on the subject. But this part 
of the testimony is at least open to grave doubts, 
and our witnesses must be above suspicion. 

It 


is an address in three books, written for a real or 


The work, 70 Autolycus, is above suspicion.® 


imaginary heathen friend of wide learning and high 
It represents therefore, though not a formal 
apology, the ablest apologetic literature of the time,” 
that is, about a.D. 183-185,’ and it gives its own 
evidence of the kind of man who wrote it. This is 


culture. 


the author’s view of testimony :— 


It was fitting that writers should have seen with their 
own eyes those things about which they make statements, or 
else should have accurately learnt them from those who had 
seen them. For those who write about things which are 


uncertain are as if they were beating the air.” 


And this is the witness which he himself gives 


about the Fourth Gospel. 


pp. 282-298 ; Heft 4, pp. 97-175. 
Cf. Sanday, Studia Biblica, 1885, 
pp. 89-101. 

7 Geschichte des Neutestament- 
lichen Kanons, 1888, Bad. i. pp. 
29 sq., and p. 177. 

8 © Hiernach scheint ein ernst- 
hafter Zweifel an der Tradition 
des Eusebius, dass der Bischof 
Theophilus von Antiochien der 
Verfasser sei, nicht mehr méelich.’ 
Von Gebhardt und Harnack, wt 
supra, p. 289. 

* * Un docteur tres fécond, un 


catéchiste doué d’un grand talent 
d’exposition, un polémiste habile 
selon les idées dutemps.’ Renan, 
Marc Aurele, p. 386. 

' The date is shown by internal 
evidence to be rather later than 
A.D. 177 (ad ann. xvii. Marc. 
Aurel. ), whichis given for the death 
of Theophilus in the Chronicle of 
Eusebius. See Bishop Lightfoot, 
S. Ignatius, vol. 11. ed. 1, p. 466 ; 
ed. 2, p. 468. 

? Lib. iii. cap. 11. ; ed. Von Otto, 
ut supra, tom. vill. p. 189. 


Treatise 
To Auto- 
lycus, 
c.183-185. 


His un- 
doubted 


reference 
to the 
Fourth 
Gospel, 


30 LECTURE 1. 


In the thirteenth chapter of the first book, he 
speaks of the resurrection, and uses the following 
analogy :— 

When a grain of wheat or of any other seed is cast into 
the earth, it first dies and is dissolved, and afterwards is 
raised and grows into the ear. 

This naturally reminds us of the similar analogy 
in the Fourth Gospel,’ but it is not necessarily a 
quotation from it, for some of the words are still 
more nearly allied to the passage in the First Epistle 
to the Corinthians :-— 


Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it 
abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.‘ 


The next chapter opens with the words, ‘ Be not 
therefore without faith, but have faith,’ which at 
once reminds us of, though they are not quite iden- 
tical with, our Lord’s words to 58. Thomas, ‘ Be not 


faithless, but believing.’ ὃ 
In the twenty-third chapter of the second book, 


there is a reference to the 


pains of childbirth which women suffer and afterwards forget, 
that the word of God may be fulfilled and the human race 


may increase. 


8 κόκκος σίτου ἢ τῶν λοιπῶν ἐὰν μὴ ὁ κόκκος τοῦ σίτου 
σπερμάτων, ἐπὰν βληθῇ εἰς τὴν πεσὼν εἰς τὴν γῆν ἀποθάνῃ, 
γῆν, πρῶτον ἀποθνήσκει καὶ αὐτὸς μόνος péver' ἐὰν δὲ ἀποθάνῃ, 
λύεται, εἶτα ἐγείρεται καὶ γίνεται πολὺν καρπὸν φέρει. John xii. 24. 
στάχυς. Theophilus, Ad Auto- 
lycum, lib. i. 13; ed. Von Otto, 

Corpus Apologetarwm, viii. 38, 7. 

© 1 Cor. zv. ΠΌΝΩΝ: 

° Μὴ οὖν ἀπίστει, ἀλλὰ πί-: Μὴ γίνου ἄπιστος ἀλλὰ πι- 
στευε. Ibid. i.14; ed. Von Otto, στός. John xx. 27. 


vill. 42, 1. 


LECTURE TI. a 


And it is at least probable that the writer had in 
his mind the words of our Lord :— 


A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her 
hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she 
remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born 
into the world.® 


Perhaps also there is a reference, as Drs. Von 
Otto and Zahn both think, in the twenty-ninth 
chapter of the same book, when the writer speaks of 
the entrance of death into this world as resulting 
from Satan’s causing Cain to kill Abel,’ to the decla- 
ration, ‘He was a murderer from the beginning ;’ 
but here again, did the passage stand by itself, we 
could not lay much stress upon it, as a similar 
thought occurs in the First Epistle of Clement to 
the Corinthians.® 

But the passages do not stand by themselves. 
The special interest of these references, which are 
slight when taken alone—though, as will be seen, the 


parallelism of the Greek words is very remarkable— 


6 K \ A a AnO a , σ δὲ , A bi baked 
αἱ μετὰ τοῦτο λήθην Tod πόνου ὅταν δὲ γεννήσῃ τὸ παιδίον, οὐκέτι 
μνημονεύει τῆς θλίψεως διὰ τὴν 


WG? 5) 6 > 6 > \ 
Xapav οτι eyevvnon ανσρωπος εἰς TOV 


~ ce ie ~ ~ 
ποιοῦνται, ὅπως πληρωθῇ 6 τοῦ Θεοῦ 
λόγος εἰς τὸ αὐξάνεσθαι καὶ πληθύ- 


νεσθαι τὸ γένος τῶν ἀνθρώπων. κόσμον. John xvi. 21. 
wbid. 11. 25; ed. Von Otto, viii. 
120, 3. ‘Alludit ad Joann. xvi. 21.’ 
7 oN 7 > A , ἌΡ > “ > θ , > bak) 
Kai οὕτως ἀρχὴ θανάτου ἐγένετο ἐκεῖνος ἀνθρωποκτόνος ἦν ἀπ 
εἰς τόνδε τὸν κόσμον ὁδοιπορεῖν ἕως ἀρχῆς. John viii. 44. Cf. οὐ 


τοῦ δεῦρο ἐπὶ πᾶν γένος ἀνθρώ- 
πων. Ibid. ii. 29; ed. Von Otto, 
Vili. 138, 8. 


το a \ , 
© δ οὗ καὶ θάνατος εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸν κύσμον. 


καθὼς Καὶν ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ ἦν καὶ 
ἔσφαξεν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ. 1 
John 111. 12. 

Clemens Rom. 1 Cor. 


111. ad fin., Lightfoot, ed. 1, p. 42; ed.'2, ii. p. 21. 


Gospel 
included 
among 

* Holy 
Scrip- 
tures,’ 


author 
among 
* spirit- 
bearing 
men.’ 


oe LECTURE I. 


© 


and that which makes them of great importance, is 
that they are found side by side with an undoubted 
quotation from the Fourth Gospel. This is one of 
the many instances which show the incidental way in 
which reference may be made to a work which is well 
known to the writer. 

That the Fourth Gospel was well known is clear 
from the quotation which occurs in the twenty-second 
chapter of this same second book of the Apology, 
where Theophilus says :— 


Whence we are taught by the Holy Scriptures and all 
spirit-bearing men, among whom John says: ‘In the begin- 
ning was the Word, and the Word was with God,’ showing 
that at first God was alone and the Word in Him. Then 
he saith, ‘ And the Word was God. All things were made 
by Him ; and without Him was not any thing made.’ ® 


This distinct reference to ὃ. John by name, this 
inclusion of him among ‘ spirit-bearing men,’ and this 
exact citation of his words, occur in a context in 
which the writer has been dealing with the Scriptures 


c -“ 
" Ὅθεν διδάσκουσιν ἡμᾶς αἱ 
ἅγιαι γραφαὶ καὶ πάντες ol πνευ- 
, > 2 
ματοφόροι, ἐξ ὧν 
λέγει. Ἔν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λύγος, καὶ 
e / > \ \ ΄ ῷ 
ὁ λόγος ἢν πρὸς τὸν Θεὸν 
δεικνὺς ὅτι ἐν πρώτοις μόνος ἢν ὁ 
Θεὸς καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ ὁ λόγος. Ἔπειτα 
λέγει: καὶ Θεὸς ἢν ὁ λόγος" 
πάντα δι αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ 


> ΄ 
Iwavyns 
"EK > - φ > Xo ‘ ς 
ν ἀρχῇ ἣν ὁ λογος, καὶ ὁ 
, > \ ‘ , 
λόγος ἢν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, 


Ν \ > Ψ ΄ 
καὶ Θεὸς nv ὁ λόγος. .. πάντα 
δι αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ 
ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. John i. 1-3. 


Westcott and Hort. 


χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. 
Ut supra, ii. 22 ; ed. Von Otto, 
Vili. 118, 120, 13-15. 
πνευματοφύροι is the accentuation of the codices. See Von Otto’s 
note 13, ad loc. ; and cf. cap. 9, note 1, and lib. iii. cap. 12 infra. 


LECTURE I. 33 


of the Old Testament, and it is impossible to deny 
that he thinks and writes of the Fourth Gospel as a 
divinely inspired work, which is to be placed on 
a level with the Law and the Prophets. If there were 
room for doubt as to his meaning, it would disappear 
before such words as are found at the beginning of 
the twelfth chapter of the third book :— 

Now concerning righteousness of which the Law speaks, 
the statements of the Prophets and Gospels are in harmony 
because all spirit-bearing men speak by one Spirit of God.! 


The churches of Asia Minor must necessarily 
appear as witnesses, when the question is the origin 
of the Fourth Gospel. Nor are they silent in the 
period to which our inquiry is directed. Two great 
controversies, both of which took their rise from the 
churches of Asia, then divided Christendom from 
Ephesus to Lyons, from Alexandria to Carthage and 
Rome. One is known to us from the name of its 
author, as Montanism ; the other from its subject, 
as the Paschal controversy. Montanism, with its 
central doctrine of the Paraclete, cannot avoid touch- 
ing the writings of S. John, in which alone of the 
sacred Scriptures the term Paraclete occurs ; and the 
disputants in the Paschal controversy, which is im- 
mediately concerned with the practice of the Asiatic 
churches, cannot avoid some reference to the Scrip- 


1 Ἔτι μὴν Kal περὶ δικαιοσύνης, πνευματοφόρους ἑνὶ πνεύματι Θεοῦ 
ἧς 6 νόμος εἴρηκεν, ἀκόλουθα εὑρί- δλελαληκέναι. Ibid. iii. 12 ; ed. Von 
σκεται kal τὰ τῶν προφητῶν καὶ τῶν Otto, viii, 218, 1 
εὐαγγελίων ἔχειν, διὰ τὸ τοὺς πάντας 


Churches 
of Asia 
Minor: 


Witnesses 
from Sar- 
dis and 
Hiera- 
polis: 


Melito, 


f1.150-180. 


List in 
Eusebius. 


34 LECTURE I. 


tures which they received. Now towards the close of 
the second century, two Asiatic bishops, Melito of 
Sardis the capital of Lydia, and Apolinaris’ of 
Hierapolis in Phrygia, were voluminous and widely 
read authors. ‘Their writings are at present known 
to us only by scanty fragments ; but Eusebius and 
Jerome*® have preserved the titles of their works, 
and we can form a probable opinion of the nature 
and extent of their influence. 

The period of Melito’s literary activity may be 
taken as from about A.D. 150 to 180. 
that activity may be estimated from the following 
list of his works, which is given by Eusebius as an 


The area of 


imperfect one and based only on his own personal 


knowledge :— 


1. On the Paschal Fes- 
tival (two books). 

2. On the right method of 
Life and on the Prophets. 

3. On the Church. 

4, On the Lord’s Day. 

5. On the Faith of Man. 


2 ᾿Απολινάριος constanter apud 
Greecos dicitur, non ᾿Απολλινάριος, 
quod exspectabas, h.e. Latinorum 


Apollinaris . . . Von Otto, Cor- 
pus, ix. 479. 
3 De Viris illustribus, capp. 


Xxiv. xxvi. ; ed. Bened., wtsupra, 
tom. 11. pp. 851 sqq. 

περὶ πλάσεως. Rendered ‘On 
Creation’ by Bishop Lightfoot, 
Essays on Supernatural Religion, 
p. 225; and ‘On the Formation 


6. On the Creation of Man.‘ 
7. On the Obedience of 
Faith. 
8. On the Senses. 
9. On the Soul and Body. 
10. On Baptism. 
ll. On Truth. 


of the World’ by Dr. Westcott, 
On the Canon, ed. 6, p. 223. 
But the word seems to have ac- 
quired a technical sense which 
was limited to the creation of 
man, Cf. Gen. i. 7, ARSE 
Tim. ii. 13; Justin, Dial. cme 
Tryph. cap. 40. See esp. Von 
Otto’s note, Corpus, tom. ix. p. 
392 ; and Von Gebhardt und Har- 
nack, Texte wu. Untersuchungen, 
Bd. i. p. 246. 


LECTURE I. 


12. On the 
Birth of Christ. 

13. On Prophecy. 

14. On Love of Strangers. 

15. The Καὶ 


Oreation and 


(BX) 
Cx 


17. On a Corporeal God. 

18. An Apology to Anto- 
minus. 

19. Haxtracts from the 
Law and the Prophets (six 


16. On the Devil and the 
Apocalypse of John. 


books).® 


Some other works which are ascribed to Melito 
by later writers are of doubtful authority; but it is 
probable that the treatise On the Incarnation of Christ, 
from the third book of which Anastatius of Sinai 
quotes, when writing in the seventh century, against 
the Monophysites, and that On the Passion, which is 
also quoted by Anastatius ;‘ and the writings On the 
Faith and On the Cross, which are now known only 
from Syriac fragments,’ are genuine works which 
are not included in the Eusebian list. The Syriac 
furnishes also fragments of an Apology to Antoninus, 
which no less an authority than Dr. Westcott thinks 
to be a ‘genuine book of Melito of Sardis,’ and 
which clearly shows the influence of 5. John’s 
writings. Its authenticity cannot however be said 
to be quite certain,’ and I do not therefore lay any 
stress upon it. 


5 This work does not exist in 
the Syriac MS. version of Eu- 
sebius ; and the attempt of Car- 
dinal Pitra to prove that the 
Clermont MS. contains a Latin 


Kritiken, 1857, p. 584. 

6 Hist. Eccles. iv. 26. 

7 Οδηγός seu dux vize adversus 
Acephalos, ed. Gretser, 1806, 
CG. kil. p. 216 ; xi, ρὲ 260: 


translation of the second century 
Greek original, cannot be said to 
be successful. Cf. Spicileqiwm 
Solesmense, tom. ii. pp. 1-519 ; iii. 
pp. 1-307 ; and Steitz, Studien wu. 


8 Cf. Cureton, Spicilegiwm Syria- 
cum, 1855, pp. 52-3. 

9. Canon of the New Testament, 
ed. 6, p. 222. 

1 Cf. Lecture VII. p. 408. 


po 


Other 
lists. 


Apolina- 
ris, 
mati. 


Lists in 
Eusebius, 


Theodoret, 


and 
Photius. 


LECTURE 1. 


Claudius Apolinaris, a successor of Papias in the 
see of Hierapolis, was a somewhat younger contem- 
porary of Melito. Eusebius speaks of him as a 
strong and irresistible weapon against Montanism,* 
and refers to several works by him which were 
preserved by many, and gives the titles of four which 
were known to himself :—* 


1. An Apology addressed 
to Marcus Aurelius. 
2. Against the Greeks (five 


3. On Truth (two books).4 
4. Against the Heresy of 
the Phrygians (Montanists). 


books). 


Theodoret refers to a work Against the Severians,? 
which is otherwise unknown, and notes the wide ac- 
quaintance of Apolinaris with general literature.® 

Photius of Constantinople, writing as late as the 
ninth century, relates that he had read three works 
by Apolinaris, Against the Greeks, On Godliness, and 
On Truth, which may be wholly or partly identical 
with parallel works in the list of Eusebius, and 


adds :— 


There are said to be other works of this author which are 
worthy of notice, but we have not yet met with them.’ 


2, Hist. Eccles. v. 16. 

5. Ibid. iv. 27. 

4 ¢Textus Vulgatus ap. Euseb. 
addit: καὶ πρὸς ᾿Ιουδαίους πρῶτον 
Sed hee verba non 
comparent in optimis codd. mstis 
(BC D F* K ἘΠ) neque apud Ruf- 
finum et Hieronymum: qua- 
propter, quum a librario quodam 
moleste sedulo addita sint, recte 
omittuntur a Leemmero et Heini- 
cheno.’ Von Otto, Corpus, tom. 


A ’ 
καὶ δεύτερον. 


ix. p. 481, note 3. 

Ὁ Hereticarum Fabularum Com- 
pendium, i. 21; ed. Migne, iv. 
p. 372. 

ὁ ἀνὴρ ἀξιέπαινος, καὶ πρὸς τῇ 
γνώσει τῶν θείων καὶ τὴν ἔξωθεν 
παιδείαν προςειληφώς. Heret. Fab. 
ut swpra, iii. 2; ibid. p. 404. 

7 ᾿Ανεγνώσθη ᾿Απολιναρίου πρὸς 
Ἕλληνας καὶ περὶ εὐσεβείας καὶ περὶ 
ἀληθείας. ἔστι δὲ ἹἹεραπολίτης ὁ συγ- 
γραφεύς, τῆς ἐν ᾿Ασίᾳ Ἱεραπόλεως 


LECTURE 1 at 


Two extracts from a treatise by Apolinaris On 
the Paschal Festival are preserved in the Paschal 
Chronicle, both of which contain references to the 
Fourth Gospel. They are quoted by Bishop Light- 
foot,® whose argument I am here following, and also 
by Dr. Salmon,’ but I de not produce them as wit- 
nesses, Inasmuch as their authenticity, though in 
the highest degree probable and admitted even by 
Strauss ! and Scholten,” cannot be considered to have 
been placed beyond doubt.* 

The real significance of the evidence of these two 
bishops arises moreover not from existing fragments 
but from the extent of their writings, and the im- 
pression made by these writings on contemporary 
and succeeding literature; from the fact that the 
questions which occupied the anxious thought of the 
Church, and in which they took a prominent part, 
were questions which specially concerned Asia Minor 


His 
reference 
to the 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Testimony 
to writings 
of Melito 
and 
Apolina- 
ris, by 


and Ephesus, and specially concerned the Fourth > 


Gospel ; and from the fact that there is nowhere the 
slightest hint that in all the width of these volumi- 


\ sas ” Sh UES 
γεγονὼς ἐπίσκοπος. ἤνθησε δὲ ἐπὶ 


Μάρκου ᾿Αντωνίνου Βήρου βασιλέως Bruchstiicke, die Neander be- 


“Ῥωμαίων ἀξιόλογος δὲ 6 ἀνὴρ καὶ 
φράσει ἀξιολόγῳ κεχρημένος. λέγεται 
δὲ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἕτερα συγγράμματα 
ἀξιομνημόνευτα εἶναι, οἷς οὔπω ἡμεῖς 
᾿ ἐνετύχομεν. Bibliotheca, cod. 14 ; 
ed. Bekker. p. 4. 

8 Essays on Supernatural Reli- 
gion, p. 239. 

9. Introduction, ed. 3, p. 264. 

1 Das Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 69. 


zweifelte, ist jetzt kein Zwiespalt 
mehr.’ Scholten-Manchot, Die 
diltesten Zeugnisse betreffend die 
Schriften des Neuen Testamentes 
historisch untersucht, p. 484. 

3 Cf. Lardner, Credibility, part 
ii. c. 28,11. Donaldson, History 
of Christian Literature, vol. 111. 
p. 247. 


2 Ueber die Kchtheit dieser - 


Poly- 
crates, 


Hippoly- 
tus, 


Tertul- 
lian, 


Clement, 


38 LECTURE I. 


nous writings, which practically formed the theo- 
logical encyclopedias of the day, there is any doubt 
whatever about the reception of the Fourth Gospel 
in the churches of Asia. 

To Polycrates of Ephesus, Melito is one 
whose walk was entirely guided by the Holy Spirit, who now 


rests at Sardis waiting for the episcopate from heaven when he 
shall rise from the dead.* 


Hippolytus asks 


Who is ignorant of the works of Irenzus and Melito and 
the rest in which Christ is declared to be God and man ᾿ ὃ 


Jerome quotes Tertullian as saying of him 
that he was reckoned a prophet by most of our people.® 


Clement of Alexandria wrote a treatise on the 
Paschal Festival, which was suggested by Melito’s 
work on the same subject,’ and the opinion that 
Melito was himself the Ionian who is included in 
the list of Clement’s teachers ὃ cannot be considered 
to be improbable. 

In Carthage, in Ephesus, in Rome, in Alexandria, 
Melito is then a recognized authority in the Church 
at the close of the second century. His critical 
inquiries about the Canon of the Old Testament 
connect him also with the East, of which he speaks 


* Eusebius, Hist. Hecles. ν. 24.  cavillatur, dicens eum a plerisque 
> Ibid. v. 28. nostrorum Prophetam  putari.’ 
* *Hujus elegans et declama- De Viris illustribus, c. xxiv. ; ut 
torium ingenium Tertullianus in supra, tom. ii. p. 853-54. 
septem libris, quos scripsit ad- 7 Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. iv. 26. 
versus Ecclesiam pro Montano, S Tid. v.11. 


LECTURE:-T 39 


as ‘the place where these things were proclaimed 
and done.’ ® 
To Anastatius of Sinai he is 


the divine and all wise among teachers.! 


That is, in the monasteries of Sinai as late as the 
seventh century, the echoes of the second-century 
judgments are still heard, and Melito is esteemed as 
a well-known and orthodox Father of the Church. 


The reception given to the works of Apolinaris is 
not less general. We have seen in what light they 
were regarded by Eusebius, Theodoret, and Photius. 

Serapion, who was bishop of Antioch at the close 
of the second century, and himself a considerable 
theological writer, names Apolinaris in a letter which 
he wrote to Caricus and Ponticus, who were also 
ecclesiastical writers, in the following terms :— 

But in order that you may see that the influence of this 
false school of new prophecy, as it is called, has been abhorred 
by all the brethren in the world, I have sent unto you the 
writings of Claudius Apolinaris most blessed, who was bishop 
of Hierapolis in Asia.? 

Eusebius relates that this letter was subscribed 
also by many other bishops, among them being 
Aurelius Cyrenius, and Alius Publius Julius, bishop 
of Debeltum, a colony of Thrace, in their own hand,? 
so that it becomes a witness on the part of many 


9. Kusebius, Hist. Hecles. iv. 26. supra, xiii. p. 260. 
1 ὁ θεῖος καὶ πάνσοφος ἐν δι- 2 Kuseb. Hist. Eccles. vi. 12. 
δασκάλοις Μελίτων, ---ἰΟδηγός, ut 5 Ibid. v. 19. 


Anasta- 
tius, 


Serapion’s 
letter 
which is 


sub- 
scribed by 
other 
bishops, 


Jerome, 


Socrates. 


40 LECTURE I. 


dioceses to the position and influence of Apolinaris. 
The witness of Serapion himself is moreover of high 
value, not only from his date and the honour in 
which he was held as a bishop and as an author, 
but also from his care in respect of the Canon, of 
which we have an example in the fact that he recalled 
the permission which had been given to the church 
of Rhossus on the gulf of Issus to read the so-called 
gospel of Peter.* 

Jerome also classes Apolinaris with Melito and 
others, as a writer who had full knowledge of heathen 
literature, and used it in refuting heresies,’ while 
Socrates places him with Ireneus, Clement, and 
Serapion, as teaching that our Lord, when He became 
man, had a human soul.° 

The general esteem in which both these great 
Asiatic theologians were held by the churches of 
Christendom at the close of the second century, 


-and in succeeding generations to whom that second- 


century history was a living reality, makes it clear 
what their own position was in relation to the 


* EKuseb. Hist. Eccles. vi. 12. 

> *Quid loquar de Melitone 
Sardensi Episcopo? quid de 
Apollinario Hierapolitanze Kce- 
clesize Sacerdote, Dionysioque Co- 
rinthiorum Episcopo, et Tatiano, 
et Bardesane, et Irenzo Photini 
Martyris successore : qui origines 
hereseon singularum, et ex 
quibus Philosophorum fontibus 
emanarint, multis voluminibus 
explicarunt ?’ ΜΠ ἰδέ. xx. ad Mag- 


num, Opera, ed. Bened. wt supra, 
tom. 1. p. 426. 

6 Kal yap Εἰρηναῖός re καὶ Κλήμης, 
᾿Απολινάριός τε ὁ ‘leparoXirns καὶ 
Σαραπίων ὁ τῆς ἐν ᾿Αντιοχείᾳ 
προεστὼς ἐκκλησίας ἔμψυχον τὸν 
ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, ἐν τοῖς πονηθεῖσιν 
ὁμολογούμενον 
αὐτοῖς φάσκουσιν. Socrates, Hist. 
Eccles. iii. 7; ed. Hussey, tom. i. 
p. 398. 


> ΄“ , c 
αὐτοῖς λόγοις ὡς 


LECTURE I. 4] 


Fourth Gospel; while that position is on the other 
hand a declaration, not only that the churches 
of Asia, but also that the best scholarship and 
criticism of the day, accepted the Fourth Gospel as 
the work of S. John, without even a hint that any 
other view is possible.’ 


Polycrates of Ephesus is another witness from the 
churches of Asia at the close of the second century. 
A letter was addressed by him in the name of these 
churches to Victor of Rome, in reply to an inquiry 
about their practice in keeping Easter, and a large 
extract from this letter has been preserved in 
Eusebius. He bases the Asiatic practice, as he tells 
us, on the teaching of the great luminaries of Asia, 
Philip of Hierapolis, John of Ephesus, Polycarp of 
Smyrna, Sagaris of Laodicea, Papirius, and Melito. 
He was the eighth bishop of his own family, and had 
been sixty-five years in the Lord; he had studied 
every Holy Scripture, he had taken counsel with 
brethren in all parts of the world. The bishops who 
were assembled with him were a great number, and 
knew that he did not bear his grey hairs for nought, 
and that he had always ruled his life by the Lord 
Jesus.2 This venerable bishop, writing for himself 


7 On Melito and Apolinaris, cf. 
generally, Dr. Salmon’s articles 
s.v. in Smith and Wace’s Dic- 
tionary of Christian Biography, 1. 
p. 192, 111. p. 894; Bishop Light- 
foot, Essays on Supernatural Reli- 
gion, pp. 223 sqq., 237 sqq.; Von 
Otto, Corpus, tom. ix. pp. 374- 


511; Routh, Reliquie Sacre, tom. 
i. pp. 111-174 ; and especially the 
remarkable monograph by Dr. 
Adolf Harnack, Von Gebhardt 
und Harnack, Texte w. Untersuch- 
ungen, Bd. i. pp. 232-282. 

8 EKuseb. Hist. Eccles. v. 24. 


Polycrates 
of 
Ephesus, 
fl. 190. 


Letter 
addressed 
to Victor 
of Rome. 


His 
position. 


His testi- 
mony to 
the Fourth 
Gospel. 


Old Latin 
and 
Peshito 
Versions : 


Dr. 
Liddon’s 
approval 
of Dr. 
Westcott’s 
opinions : 


on the 
Old Latin, 


49 LECTURE I. 


and his episcopal brethren and sons, describes S. 
John in the exact words of the Gospel, as ‘ he that 
leaned on the bosom of the Lord ;’* and although 
we are perhaps not justified in asserting that this is 
necessarily a reference to the Fourth Gospel,’ it is 
natural to believe it to be so, and it is impossible to 
doubt that this Ephesian bishop was in harmony 
with ‘the great luminaries of Asia’ in accepting the 


Gospel as the work of ὃ. John. 


It has been customary to attest the position of 
the New Testament Canon, and therefore of the 
Fourth Gospel, in the closing decades of the second 
century, by the Old Latin and Peshito Syriac 
Versions, and by the Muratorian Fragment. The 
Bampton Lecturer for 1866, for example, quotes with 
approval the opinion of Dr. Westcott, that the Old 
Latin must have been made before a.p. 170, and that 
Tertullian’s use of it shows, 
that at the end of the century the Latin translation of St. 


John’s Gospel had been so generally circulated in Africa, as 
to have moulded the popular theological dialect.? 


Few among us will question the high authority—I 


9 »~ ‘ , ΠΝ , c > 4 A > Ν ᾽ ΄- 4 » 4 ‘ 
ἔτι δὲ kal Ἰωάννης ὁ ἐπὶ τὸ ἀναπεσὼν ἐκεῖνος οὕτως ἐπὶ τὸ 
στῆθος τοῦ Κυρίου ἀναπεσὼν, 6s στῆθος τοῦ ᾿Ιησοῦ. . . John xiii. 
> , € ‘ ‘ ‘4 ~ A Ν > ᾿ » ΄“ ’ 
ἐγενήθη ἱερεὺς τὸ πέταλον mepopek@s, 25. ὃς καὶ ἀνέπεσεν ἐν τῷ δείπνῳ 
‘ , \ ΄ bp > 5 τῆς ι A αν τ 
καὶ μάρτυς καὶ διδάσκαλος" οὗτος ἐν ἐπὶ τὸ στῆθος αὐτοῦ... John 
Ian ΄ . . - 
Edéoo κεκοίμηται. Eusebius, Hist. xxi. 20. 
Eccles. v. 24. 


' But see Bishop Lightfoot, * Liddon, Bampton Lectures, 
Essays on Supernatural Religion, 1866, ed. 13, 1889, p. 215. 
p. 249. 


LECTURE. I. 45 


should certainly be very far from doing so—of the 
Oxford Lecturer who quotes, or that of the Cambridge 
Professor who is quoted. ‘The opinion weighed and 
re-weighed with fulness of knowledge and fairness of 
judgment during a quarter of a century, has been 
expressed again quite lately by Dr. Westcott,’ to- 
gether with the allied opinion that 


the Latin translation of Irenzeus was probably known to 
Tertullian,‘ 


and the belief that 


Tertullian and the Translator of Irenzeus represent respectively 
the original African and Gallic recensions of the Vetus Latina.® 
The same Bampton Lecturer, following the same 
Cambridge Professor, says of the Peshito Syriac, 
That it was complete then in A.D. 150-160, we may assume 
without risk of serious error.® 
And in the latest edition of his work On the Canon, 
published last year, Dr. Westcott has seen 


no sufficient reason to desert the opinion which has obtained 
the sanction of the most competent scholars, that its formation 
is to be fixed within the first half of the second century.’ 


The same high authorities claim in the same way 
that 
at Rome St. John’s Gospel was certainly received as being 


the work of that Apostle in the year 170. This is clear from 
the so-termed Muratorian fragment ; ὃ 


7 On the Canon, ed. 6, 1889, 7 On the Canon, ut supra, p. 


p. 251. 243. 
* Ibid. p. 256. 8 Bampton Lectures, ut swpra, 
> Ibid. p. 257, note. p. 214, based upon Westcott, On 


© Op. cit. p. 214, note. the Canon, p. 214. 


on the 
Peshito, 


on the 
Mura- 
torian 
Fragment. 


Force of 
the 
evidence, 


if their 
early date 
is esta- 
blished. 


44 LECTURE I. 


and in 1889, Dr. Westcott again expressed the view 
that 

The statement in the text of the Fragment is perfectly 
clear, definite, and consistent with its contents, and there can 
be no reason either to question its accuracy or to interpret it 
loosely.® 

Now, here are witnesses of the first importance 
ready to our hands, and if these statements about 
the Versions, and the Fragment of Muratori,! with all 
that would follow from the texts of the Versions and 
the antecedent conditions of the Fragment, could be 
established beyond question—and perhaps they will 
be established—we should be far on the way to 
render any discussion of the acceptance of the Fourth 
Gospel in the second century wholly unnecessary. 
And if [do not deduce from this testimony all that 
would seem to follow from it, it is not because I am 
convinced that it is not trustworthy, or that I should 
in any case venture to assert my own opinion against 
the opinion of those who believe that it is; but 
because I cannot claim more than a small fraction 
of the completeness of knowledge of this subject 
which ought to be the substructure of a definite 
statement upon it ; and because, as far as I can follow 
the currents of present criticism, it cannot be re- 
garded as settled beyond question that any known 
Version of the New Testament or any distinct portion 
of it, was committed to writing before the close of 


° On the Canon, ut supra, p. " But ef. Salmon, Introduction, 
212 1888, pp. 46-53. 


LECTURE I. 45 


the second century, or that the Muratorian Frag- 
ment is of quite so early a date as that which critics 
have generally assigned to it. These matters are 
still before the judgment of experts. For my own 
part, 1 should like to await the verdict, which the 
not-distant future must almost certainly give, with- 
out offering any opinion—though I am far from not 
having one—as to what that verdict will be. 
Meanwhile, few among the theologians or critics 
of this century will be regarded as entitled to speak on 
this question with greater weight than the lamented 
and revered Bishop Lightfoot and Dr. von Dillinger. 
One of Bishop Lightfoot’s latest articles shows it to 
be at least probable that the original of the Fragment 
must have been in Greek verse, and confirms the view 
that it was almost certainly in the Greek language.’ 
Dr. Dollinger was kind enough but a short time 
before his death, to give me permission to state his 
opinion on the Fragment in the following terms :— 
I regard it as certain that the Muratorian Fragment is 
to be placed between A.D. 150 and 4.p. 175, and that accord- 
ingly the Pastor of Hermas falls in the period from a.p. 130 


to about A.D. 150. ‘This is also the prevailing and best sup- 


ported opinion among German theologians, both Catholic and 
Protestant.? 


* The Academy, September 21, 
1889, pp. 186 sqq. See also reply 
by the author of Supernatural 
Religion, in The Academy, Sep- 
tember 28, p. 205. 

3 ‘Ich halte fiir sicher, dass das 
Fragm. Muratorianum in die Zeit 
von 150 bis 175 zu setzen sei, und 


dass also der Pastor des Hermas 
in die Zeit von 130 bis etwa 150 
falle. Diess ist auch unter den 
deutschen Theologen beider Con- 
fessionen die ueberwiegende und 


best vortretene Ansicht.’ Ign. 
Doellinger, Miinchen, 5 Aug. 
1889. 


Recent 
opinions : 


Bishop 


Lightfoot, 


Dr. von 
Dollinger. 


Result in- 
dependent 
of these 
opinions. 


Summary : 


46 LECTURE I. 


But the question which is at present occupying 
our attention—the reception of the Fourth Gospel 
towards the close of the second century—will not be 
seriously affected by any verdict on these points. 
If it should be proved that the Versions and the 
Fragment belong to the early years of the third 
rather than to the closing years of the second 
century, it will not take from the abundant evidence 
which we already possess ; and if it should be proved 
that they belong to the second century, it cannot 
make more certain that which is quite certain now. 
And quite certain it is ; for every witness who has 
been brought before the tribunal of modern criticism 
has testified to it, every cross-examination has con- 
firmed it, every re-examination has brought out some 
new point in favour of it. No advocate known in 
the courts of criticism has ventured to call rebutting 
evidence. Hilgenfeld and Volkmar, Scholten and 
Loman, Strauss and Renan, Davidson and the author 
of Supernatural Religion, all admit it ; and there is 
no more reason to doubt that the Fourth Gospel 
was known and read as the work of 8. John in the 
closing decades of the second, than that it is so known 
and read in the closing decades of the nineteenth 
century. 


Why then have I taxed your patience with even 
the outlines of evidence—many who hear me will 
know how much 1 have spared you—to prove that 
which is undoubted ? Partly because the longer 


LECTURE 1. 47 


a man lives, the more does he learn to take nothing 
for granted ; and the more does he find that the 
force of the well-known is not always felt, and that 
references to authorities are not always followed out. 
But chiefly because the importance of the facts which 
are admitted, lies not so much in themselves, as in 
the evidence on which they are based. 

It is not that the Fourth Gospel was known and 
read as the work of 8. John in the year a.p. 190 or 
180 or 170 ; but that it was known and read through 
all the extent of Christendom, in churches varying 
in origin and language and history, in Lyons and 
Rome, in Carthage and Alexandria, in Athens and 
Corinth, in Ephesus and Sardis and Hierapolis, in 
Antioch and Edessa ; that the witness is of churches 
to a sacred book which was read in their services, 
and about which there could be no mistake, and of 
individuals who had sacrificed the greatest good of 
temporal life, and were ready to sacrifice life itself as 
a witness to its truth; that these individual wit- 
nesses were men of culture and rich mental endow- 
ment, with full access to materials for judgment, and 
full power to exercise that judgment; that their 
witness was given in the face of hostile heathenism 
and opposing heresy, which demanded caution in 
argument and reserve in statement; and that this 
witness is clear, definite, unquestioned. 

It is not that the Fourth Gospel was known at the 
end of the second century, but that it was received 
as divine in churches each of which had a corporate 


Strength 
of testi- 
mony. 


Its extent 
and unan- 
imity. 


The 
corporate 


life of 
the 
Church. 


Answer of 
author of 
Super- 
natural 
Religion. 


48 LECTURE I. 


life and unity, stretching back to the foundation by 
Apostles and Prophets ; and that its chief witnesses 
are men whose lives bridge wide intervals of place 
and time. The witness of Irenzus is the product 
of a life spent in Gaul and Rome and Asia Minor, 
and extending backwards for threescore years and 
ten from the close of the second century. Tor a quarter 
of a century he was a contemporary of Polycarp, who 
must have been for a like period a contemporary of 
S. John. Tertullian’s witness is that of a life spent 
in North Africa and Rome. Clement’s witness links 
together Greece and Italy, the far East and Egypt, 
and teachers of almost every nation. These writers 
all claim, in terms which cannot be mistaken, and 
with a force which cannot be resisted, their unity 
with those who had preceded them even to Apostolic 
times. 

The author of Supernatural Religion in his general 
reply to criticisms on his work, which he issued as a 
preface to the sixth edition in 1875, and repeated in 
the seventh and complete edition in 1879, and again 
last year, cannot avoid some answer to the question 
how, if no trace of their existence is previously discoverable, 
the four Gospels are suddenly found in general circulation at 


the end of the second century, and quoted as authoritative 
documents by such writers as Irenzeus. 


He admits the fact in the terms which 1 have just 
read, and adds, 


My reply is that it is totally unnecessary for me to account 
for this. No one acquainted with the history of pseudo- 


LECTURE I. 49 


nymic literature in the second century, and with the rapid 
circulation and ready acceptance of spurious works tending 
to edification, could for a moment regard the canonical posi- 
tion of any Gospel at the end of that century either as 
evidence of its authenticity or early origin. That which 
concerns us chiefly is not evidence regarding the end of the 
second but the beginning of the first century. Hven if we 
took the statements of Irenzeus and later Fathers, like the 
Alexandrian Clement, Tertullian and Origen, about the 
Gospels, they are absolutely without value except as personal 
opinion at a late date, for which no sufficient grounds are 
shown. Of the earlier history of those Gospels there is not 
a distinct trace, except of a nature which altogether discredits 
them as witnesses for miracles.‘ 

Now an author has a perfect right to decide what is 
necessary and due to his subject and to himself, but 
if he thinks it totally unnecessary to account for the 
most important and best established fact in the whole 
case, and then proceeds to make general remarks 
which certainly do not account for it, he abandons 
the judicial inquiry of a critic, and assumes the posi- 


tion of a special pleader for a desperate cause. 


We stand on the banks of a river which we are 
tracking to its source. We can follow it here by 
rapid stream, and there by calmer deep, now through 
fertile plain, and now over mountain rock. Our way 
is blocked. Beyond is the gloom of an almost im- 
penetrable forest ; but here, as it emerges from the 
forest, our river is broad, full, well defined. What 
traveller doubts that if he could make a way through 


4 A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot’s Essays, 1889, p. 43. 


Con- 
clusion. 


00 LECTURE I. 


the forest he would find the river again ? It is here, 
and is in strength and volume such as prove it to 
be far from its source. It must be, it is, yonder. 


It will be our task in the next lecture to follow 
some of the tracks which have been made in the 
forest, and see if we come upon our river. 


LECLU Rit | 1 


THE ‘JUDGMENT OF CENTURIES’ 


THE SECOND CENTURY: EARLIER GENERATIONS 


EQ 


‘IT DESERVES LIKEWISE TO BE ATTENDED TO ON THIS SUBJECT, THAT 
IN A NUMBER OF CONCURRENT TESTIMONIES, (IN CASES WHEREIN THERE 
COULD HAVE BEEN NO PREVIOUS CONCERT) THERE IS A PROBABILITY DIS- 
TINCT FROM THAT WHICH MAY BE TERMED THE SUM OF THE PROBABILITIES 
RESULTING FROM THE TESTIMONIES OF THE WITNESSES, A PROBABILITY 
WHICH WOULD REMAIN EVEN THOUGH THE WITNESSES WERE OF SUCH A 
CHARACTER AS TO MER!T NO FAITH AT ALL. THIS PROBABILITY ARISETH 
PURELY FROM THE CONCURRENCE ITSELF. THAT SUCH A CONCURRENCE 
SHOULD SPRING FROM CHANCE, IS AS ONE TO INFINITE; THAT IS, IN OTHER 
WORDS, MORALLY IMPOSSIBLE. IF THEREFORE CONCERT BE EXCLUDED, 
THERE REMAINS NO OTHER CAUSE BUT THE REALITY OF THE FACT.’ 


Principal Campbell. 


LECTURE IL. 


Remember the days of old, 
Consider the years of many generations ; 
Ask thy father, and he will shew thee ; 
Thine elders, and they will tell thee. 
Deut. xxxii. 7. 


Fiavius Justinus, philosopher and martyr, is for 
the middle what Irenzus is for the later decades of 
the second century, the chief ecclesiastical author and 
the most important witness for the sacred writings of 
the Church. We know few details of his life, and 
these come for the most part from himself. He tells 
us that he was by descent a Samaritan,’ but he does 
not mean by this more than that his ancestors had 
settled at Flavia Neapolis, a town which had been 
built near the ruins of Sychem, and is now known 
as Nablous. The town was named after Flavius 
Vespasian, and so was Justin himself, and perhaps 
he belonged to the colony planted there by the 
emperor after the destruction of Jerusalem. His 
father’s name, Justinus Priscus, was, like his own, 
Latin ; his grandfather’s, Bacchius, was Greek.” He 

1 Dialogus cum Tryphone, cap. cxx. ; ed. Von Otto, Corpus, tom. i. 


p. 432. 
2 Apologia, i. 1; Von Otto, i. 4. 


Evidence 
of the 
second 
century: 
The second 
genera- 
tion. 
Justin 


Martyr, 
fl.130-160. 


His con- 
version. 


54 LECTURE II. 


describes himself as a Gentile, who was uncircumcised 
and had been trained as a Greek.? 

The story of his conversion as told in his own words 
is familiar, but always interesting, and is for our 
present inquiry important. It is not Justin only who 
speaks, as we hear the record of the soul in search for 
truth at any cost, and telling how he sought it in 
every creed of philosophy ; how he spent a good deal 
of time with a Stoic, but found that he acquired no full 
knowledge of God because his agnostic tutor did not 
know God himself, and therefore did not think such 
knowledge necessary ; how he then tried one who 
was called a Peripatetic, and was a shrewd fellow 
in his own opinion, but was after a few days too 
anxious for his fee, and was therefore in his pupil’s 
opinion no philosopher at all; how, impelled by 
intense desire, he next tried a very famous Pythago- 
rean, who made a great show of wisdom, and assumed 
that his hearer would have passed through the pre- 
liminary courses of music, astronomy, and geometry, 
and as soon as he confessed that he knew nothing 
about them sent him away ; how, in his disappoint- 
ment and helplessness, he thought he would try the 
Platonists, who had great fame, and was able to do 
so because a leading Platonist had lately come to live 
in his city ; how he got on rapidly in his studies, 
and rose by intelligence of incorporeal things, and by 
contemplation of ideas, as on wings of the mind, until 


δ΄ Apol. i. 53; Von Otto, i. pp. 142-4. Dial. capp. ii. and xxix. ; 
ibid, 1. pp. 6 sqq., and 96-8. 


LECTURE IL 5) 


he thought that he was wise, and in his folly expected 
at once to attain the end of philosophy, the vision of 
God ; how one day, in a field not far from the sea, 
chosen as fitting for his contemplative walk, he met 
an old man, rather striking in appearance, gentle and 
grave in manner, who entered into conversation with 
him, and led him step by step as in a Platonic 
dialogue, to doubt all human wisdem ; how, since he 
was unable himself to resist the questions closing 
around him, he endeavoured to shield himself behind 
authority, and asked whether these things had escaped 
the wisdom of Plato and Pythagoras, who were as a 
wall and fortress of philosophy ; how he received the 
answer that truth is independent of what these or any 
men have held, that long before any philosophers there 
existed prophets who did not demonstrate truths but 
witnessed to them, being filled by the Holy Spirit, 
and speaking the things which they saw and heard ; 
how, after telling him these and other things, the old 
man left him alone, and bade him think of them ; and 
how a flame was forthwith kindled in his soul, and 
he found this philosophy alone to be profitable and 
safe.* 

Such was the training of our present witness. 
Here is his view of the ethics of opinion :— 

Reason dictates that men who are indeed good and 
worthy to be called philosophers, should give honour and 
regard only to the true, refusing to follow the opinions of 


those who have gone before, if these opinions are worthless. 
The same sound reason dictates also, that we should not 


* Dial. capp. ii.-viii. ; Von Otto, i. pp. 6-34. 


His ethics 
ofopinion. 


His writ- 
ings. 


Chrono- 
logy not 
accurately 
known. 


56 LECTURE IL. 


follow those who have done or taught anything wrong; but 
that a lover of truth must by all means, even if it be at the 
cost of life, and in the very presence of death, choose both to 
say and do the right.° 


That in this statement we have no mere form of 
words, but the convictions of a true man, the term 
Martyr, which has been always associated with 
Justin, will serve to remind us. 

Justin was a voluminous writer, and not a few 
works which bear internal evidence of a later date 
have claimed the support of his name. Men who are 
attracted by the microscopic investigations of the six- 
teenth or seventeenth, as well as of the nineteenth 
century, will find here an abundant. field for them 
which has been by no means neglected ; but there is 
now little disagreement among scholars of the most 
opposed general positions, as to the genuine writings 
of Justin. The two Apologies and the Dialogue with 
Trypho are his; more than this cannot be said with 
confidence. The Second Apology, which consists of 
only a few pages, is not free from difficulties, but 
it has no connexion with the present question, and 
they need not be considered here. The First Apology 
and the Dialogue are documents of primary import- 
ance. 

The chronology of Justin’s life, and the dates of 
his writings, have not been, perhaps cannot be, accu- 
rately established, and with our present knowledge 
we must remain content with approximations ; but 


δ Apol. i. 2; Von Otto, i. pp. 6-8. 


LECTURE IL, 7 


it is admitted that this imperfection has no practical 
effect on the evidence. Credner, of whom his pupil 
and editor, Dr. Volkmar, speaks with hardly too 
great confidence when he predicts that ‘his name 
will remain honoured as long as the science of Intro- 
duction to the New Testament shall exist,’® places 
in his chief and, alas, posthumous work, the writings 
of Justin soon after a.D. 130, and his death soon 
after A.D. 166.7 Volkmar, in a note to this passage, 
naturally calls attention to later investigations of his 
own,® by which the possible limits of the writings 
had been narrowed from a.p. 130-166 to a.p. 140- 
150, but adds that this does not affect the result. 
You will remember that both Credner and Volkmar 
represent distinctly liberal and negative lines of 
thought. Side by side with Volkmar, and indeed 
earlier—for the main conclusions of the article were 
worked out in 1852, though it was not published 
until 1857—Dr. Hort had been making independent 
inquiries, which issued in results that were consist- 
ent with Volkmar’s, but gave still narrower limits.? 
The chief difference in the course of the investiga- 
tions consists in the fact that Dr. Hort accepts, and 
Volkmar does not accept, the evidence of Epiphanius 
about Tatian.’ This gives ‘a.p. 149 or 150 as the 


® Geschichte des Neutestament- 9. Journal of Classical and 
lichen Kanon, 1860, Vorwort, Sacred Philology, iii. pp. 155-193. 
Dec. 1858. 1 Ibid. p. 156. Epiphanius, 
1-Ibid. § 3. p. 5. Panaria, i. 391; ed. Oécehler, 


ὃ Theologische Jahrbiicher, 1855, Corpus, ii. pp. 708 sqq. 
pp. 227 sqq. and 412 sqq. 


Opinions 
of: 
Credner, 


Volkmar, 


Dr. Hort. 


The First 
Apology, 


δῶ LECTURE lI. 


posterior, or rather post-posterior, limit of Justin’s 
life ;’ and Dr. Hort concludes that 

We may without fear of considerable errour set down 
Justin’s first Apology to 145 or better still to 146, and his 
death to 148. The second Apology, if really separate from 


the first, will then fall in 146 or 147, and the Dialogue with 
Tryphon about the same time.? 


This is practically a return to the older position of 
Pearson, who was followed by Dodwell, Massuet, and 
others. Modern critics had, for the most part, given 
considerable weight to the absence of the title Caesar 
from the names of Marcus Aurelius (Verissimus 
Philosophus ) and Lucius Verus (Lucius Philosophus) 
in the dedication of the First Apology, and had con- 
cluded that it could not have been written after their 
adoption by Antoninus Pius in July a.p. 138. The 
earlier date, A.v. 158 or 139, has the high authority 


of M. Waddington,’ and is also accepted by, among 


others, Dr. Caspari of Christiania,* and Dr. Adolf 
Harnack.° 

The position of Justin is a key-stone in the eccle- 
siastical history of the second century, and you will 
feel therefore that some details of his date are essential 
to our purpose, but it is unnecessary to enter at any 
greater length on a discussion which is after all chiefly 
of literary interest,® and, as we have been reminded 


2 Journal, ut supra, p. 191. Taufsymbols und der Glaubens- 

δ Mémoire de VAcadémie des regel, Thi. iii. 1875, pp. 362 sqq. 
Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, 1867, ° Theologische Literaturzeitung, 
tom. xxvi..pt. i. pp. 264 sqq. 1876, No. 1, col. 14. 

* Quellen eur Geschichte des ® *Au_ reste, c'est 1a une 


LECTURE II. 59 


by Dr. Volkmar, does not really affect the result. 
As far as the writings with which we shall have to 
deal are concerned, that is, the First Apology and the 
Dialogue, we have a consensus of opinion that they 
fall within the ten or twelve years from a.p. 138 
to A.D. 148 or 150. It will not escape your atten- 
tion that every year by which they are shifted back- 
wards increases their importance as early evidence, 
while every year by which they are pressed forwards 
welds more closely the essential unity of Justin and 
Trenzeus as witnesses for the use of the Gospels. 

The period included in the composition of the 
Dialogue itself, probably covers at least the dozen 
years which have just been marked out as our limits. 
It must have been written before the First Apology, 
for this work contains a distinct reference to it ;7 
but in the first chapter of the Dvralogue, Trypho 
describes himself as a fugitive from the war,’ and in 
the ninth chapter, when Trypho’s friends fall into 
conversation among themselves, the natural subject 
is the war in Judea. We may suppose therefore 
that the Dialogue took place at no great interval after 
the insurrection of Bar-Kochba, that is, not much 
later than a.p. 135. Justin intimates in the course of 
the discussion,’ that it is his intention to draw 


question de pure curiosité litté- laid on the expression τὸν νῦν 
raire.’ Aubé, Saint Justin, p. 39. γενόμενον πόλεμον. Cf. Apol. i. cap. 
7 Dial. cap. cxx. ad fin.; Von  xxxi. ; ibid. p. 94, note 8. 
Otto, i. p. 432. Cf. Apol. cap. ® Dial. cap. lexx. 5 abd. pp. 
xxvi. ; ibid. i. pp. 76 sqq. 286 sqq. 
8 Too much stress must not be 


and the 
Dialogue, 
c.138-15v. 


60 LECTURE I. 


up a statement of the arguments on either side, 
and early in the Dralogue’ addresses an unknown 
friend who is disclosed at the end as Marcus Pom- 
peius,” for whose benefit the account of the discussion 
seems to have been written some years after it actu- 
ally took place. How far the account is strictly 
historical, and how far it has been cast by the writer 
into its present shape after the fashion of a dialogue 
of Plato; whether Trypho is really the renowned 
Rabbi Tarphon,’ whether portions of the Dialogue 
have been lost, are questions which need not here 
concern us.* Our witness is Justin, and the evidence 
is not affected by the doubt whether Justin or Trypho 
really said certain things in a certain definite form 


1 Dial. cap. viii.; Von Otto, ii. 
pp. 32 sqq. 


Opp. p. 144, Relandus ad 
Othonem, p. 129, Cavius in 


? Ibid. cap. exli. ad fin. ; ibid. 
p. 496. 

δ “yep Tarphon, ut Judei 
pronunciant, sive ut Carpzovius 
in Introd. ad Theol. Jud. p. 84, 
mavult, Trwphon, vel potius Try- 
phon, quod nominis in Oriente, 
Syria inprimis et A.gypto usita- 
tissimum fuisse ex Scaligeri Ani- 
madverss. ad Euseb. p. 146, et 
Ezech. Spanhemio de Usu et 
prestantia Numism. p. 454, 
observat Relandus ad Othonem 
p. 151. . . . Disputatur alioquin 
inter eruditos, noster ne Tryphon 
cum Judzo illo, contra quem Jus- 
tinus Martyr disputat in dialogo, 
idem sit, an minus. Affirmant 
id Bartoloccius Parte II. p. 862, 
Drusius de Sectis Judzorum lib. 
11. ο. ii. (8), Jo. Lightfootus tom. 


Histor. Liter. p. 28 et alii, qui 
de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis ex- 
posuerunt: ex nostratibus autem 
Carpzovius 1. c. Sententie huic 
applauserunt plerique, quia in- 
primis temporis ratio eam com- 
mendare videbatur. Tryphon 
enim hica Judzis Akibe statui- 
tur zqualis, Akibe scilicet illius, 
qui princeps rebellionis Judaice, 
Coziba Pseudo Messia preeunte, 
in urbe Bitter excitate, pars fuit, 
et in isto bello vitam finiit 
secundum Judzeos a.M. 3880, 
vel 3901, i.e. a.c. 120, vel 141.’ 
Wolf, Bibliothece Hebree, part 
li. 1721, pp. 836-7. 

* See esp. Zahn, Studien zur 
Justin in Zeitschrift fiir Kirchen- 
geschichte, 1886, pp. 1-84. 


LECTURE II. 61 


about a.D. 135, or whether Justin, writing some years 
later, describes them as saying these things at that 
time. Justin’s representation of the position in which 
the interlocutors stood towards the Gospels, would be 
his own testimony to the position of the Gospels at 
the time when the Dzalogue took place. A dramatist 
of contemporaneous events does not introduce ana- 
chronisms. 

What then is the evidence of Justin, as furnished 
by his First Apology and the Dialogue with Trypho, to 
the existence and use of the Fourth Gospel in the 
fourth and fifth decades of the second century? What 
traces have we a right to expect in these writings, 
on the assumption that the work was then known 
and accepted, and what traces do we as a matter of 
fact find ? 

It will not be forgotten that the Apology is a 
short defence of Christians, addressed to the emperor, 
senate, and people of Rome. It is not a treatise on 
doctrine for the use of Christians, nor yet a declara- 
tion of the truths held by the Church in opposition 
to the perversions of heresy. It will not be expected 
therefore to contain full and clear statements, such as 
are found in the great work of Ireneus Against 
Heresies ; nor would those to whom it was addressed 
care much about the Christian writings. The ques- 
tion for them was tbe nature of Christianity itself, 
and its relation to the empire. The writer of the 
Apology would limit himself to such materials as 
would serve the purpose in hand, and would keep 


Their evi- 
dence to 
use of the 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Nature of 
an apo- 
logy. 


The 
Dialogue 
anapology 
addressed 
to Jews. 


Position 
of an apo- 
logist in 
the second 
century : 


602 LECTURE II. 


before the mind his august but heathen readers. He 
had himself been a heathen, and had been largely 
influenced in accepting the truth of Christianity by 
the fulfilment of Hebrew prophecy, and the moral 
elevation of Christians. On both of these he will 
naturally dwell in addressing other heathen. 

The Dialogue with Trypho is, in like manner, an 
apology for Christianity addressed to the Jews; but 
Trypho would not admit the authority of the Gospels 
any more than a heathen emperor would. For him 
the Old Testament is the book of oracles, and to this 
the appeal is therefore constantly made. To no writing 
of the New Testament can there be any such appeal. 
The facts of the Gospel history are referred to as 
facts, and they are not disputed ; but Justin cannot 
claim any special value for them, nor would Trypho 
grant any such claim on the ground that they were 
related by inspired authors, or were contained in 
documents of more than human authority. 

An apologist of the second century cannot more- 
over, from his very position, refer to books which 
he himself considers to be sacred, as inspired or 
authoritative. This would be to beg the question at 
issue. Nor would the names of the writers give any 
weight to statements which might be quoted from 
them. On the contrary, to omit the names of the 
sacred writers, and to avoid all reference to their 
writings, may be taken as the normal use in apolo- 
getic treatises of this period, by men whose other 
works show a familiar acquaintance with them. 


LECTURE II. 63 


This will appear from two or three examples. 
Justin’s own pupil Tatian was, as we shall have 
occasion to see presently, the compiler of a harmony 
of the four Gospels. He also wrote an apologetic 
Discourse to Greeks,? which nowhere refers by name 
to any sacred writing or any author of such writing. 
Athenagoras presented an Apology ὃ to Marcus Aure- 
lius in the last quarter of the century, when there 
was no question as to the Gospels, but he makes no 
reference by name to them or to their authors. Ter- 
tullian constantly refers to the Gospels and their 
writers in his other works; but if we stood to 
Tertullian in a similar position to that in which we 
stand to Justin—that is, if only his Apology’ and 
address To the Gentiles,? were extant—we should have 
no proof that he had any knowledge either of the 
Gospels or of their writers. Cyprian, to whom the 
Gospels were as familiar as they are to ourselves, in 
his address to Demetrian nowhere names the Gospels 
or the Evangelists. He quotes the New Testament 
writings, and in three instances quotes the Gospels ; 
but Lactantius is of opinion that even this is a wrong 
method of treatment, for Demetrian was in his view 
‘not to be confuted by authorities from that scripture 
which he regarded as false and fabricated, but by 
arguments and reason.’? It is not, therefore, a mark 


5. Oratio ad Grecos. Von Otto, tom. i. 


Corpus, tom. vi. ® Ad Nationes. Ibid. 
© Supplicatio pro Christianis. ° Lactantius, Institut. lib. vy. 
Ibid. tom. vii. § 4. Norton, Genwineness of the 


7 Apologeticum, ed. Ochler, Gospels, ed. 2, pp. 137 sq. 


Tatian, 


Athena- 
goras, 


Tertullian, 


Cyprian, 


Direct re- 
ference to 
Evange- 
lists not 
to be 
expected. 


64 LECTURE IL. 


of higher knowledge, but of ignorance, to seek verbal 
quotations in apologists of the second century. 

To expect then in these writings of Justin any 
formal claim to inspiration or Apostolic authority for 
the Gospels, or any reference by name to the Evan- 
gelists, is to ignore the essential conditions under 
which they were written ; to expect that, in works in 
which fulfilment of prophecy is the central idea, the 
subject-matter of the Fourth Gospel should be as 
prominent as that of ὃ. Matthew, or that, in works 
in which the outlines of our Lord’s teaching are ne- 
cessarily to be presented in their simplest form, the 
deeper teaching of the Fourth Gospel should be as 
prominent as the Sermon on the Mount, is to fail 
wholly in the historic imagination, which is a first 
requisite to the understanding what these apologies 
really were ; and to expect that quotations from the 
Gospels should be made by Justin with minute and 
verbal conformity to the text of any one Gospel, is 
to demand from him what is found in no ante-Nicene 
Father, and is much less frequent in writers of every 
age than is generally supposed to be the case. A 
smile of contempt has not seldom been indulged in at 
the expense of simple Christian folk who have some- 
times spoken as though, at the close of the first and 
in the earlier years of the second century, the whole 
New Testament was collected into a volume of con- 
venient size, and was in this form widely circu- 
lated throughout Christendom. But the demand 
for quotations, as it is often formulated, implies 


LECTURE II. 65 


such a volume with chapters and verses, or at least 
some collection with simple methods of division and 
reference ; and it cannot possibly be satisfied by the 
condition of things which existed at that time. 

Let us turn then to the pages of Justin, with a 
correct impression of what may fairly be expected, 
and see what traces of the Fourth Gospel are actually 
found there. If our limits will allow us to make 
only a brief examination of a very wide subject, it 
will be a satisfaction to remember that in the present 
state of modern criticism, a detailed treatment of this 
point is less necessary than that of some others. 

Now, one of the first things which strike the 
student of Justin is the recurrence of the term 
Memoirs of the Apostles, which, with some variations, 
is found alike throughout the Apology and the Dza- 
logue. We find the term now in the simplest 
form :— 


. .. it is written in the Memoirs. ! 


Again, we have ‘ Memoirs of the Apostles’ :— 


. . the Apostles in the memoirs composed by them which 
are called Gospels . . .? 

And upon the day called Sunday all who live either in 

town or country meet together at one place, and the memoirs 


1 2 - > ’, , Ω « A > , > ΄“ 
ἐν τοις αἀπομνημονευμασι γε- Ot yap ἀπόστολοι ἐν τοῖς yevo- 


γραπται. Dial. cap. ον. ad fin., μένοις ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν ἀπομνημονεύμασιν, 
quoting Matt. v. 20. Von Otto, ἃ καλεῖται εὐαγγέλια, Apol. i. cap. 
Corpus, i. p. 378. γέγραπται ἐν xvi. Then follows the Eucha- 
τοῖς ἀπομνημονεύμασιν, cap. cvii. ristic formula from Luke xxii. 19 ; 
ad init., quoting Matt. xvi. 1,4, cf. Matt. xxvi. 28. Ibid. i. 182. 
ef. xii. 39. Ibid. i. 382. 


F 


Traces of 
Fourth 
Gospel 
in Justin. 


Recur- 
rence of 
term 
Memoirs : 


The 
Memoirs, 


Memoirs 
of the 
Apostles, 


Memoirs 
of His 
Apostles, 


his 


Memoirs. 


66 LECTURE II. 


of the Apostles and the writings of the prophets are read as 
long as time permits.’ 

For this devil . . . is saidin the memoirs of the Apostles 
to have drawn near to Him, and to have tempted Him.* 

Then again we have the form ‘ Memoirs of His 
Apostles,’ where ‘ His’ distinctly refers to our Lord:— 

. we find it recorded in the memoirs of His Apostles that 
He is the Son of God.? 

. which things are also written in the memoirs of His 
Apostles.® 

. . as has been shown in the memoirs of His Apostles.’ 


. . which things indeed are reported to have happened in 
the memoirs of His Apostles.® 


Then the form ‘ his Memoirs ’:— 


It is said that one of the Apostles was called Peter after his 
name was changed, and this is recorded in his memoirs— 3 
where ‘his memoirs’ may mean the ‘memoirs of 
Peter,’ 1.6. the Gospel of Mark, where the change of 
name is recorded, or the ‘memoirs of Christ ;’ but 
neither usage has any parallel in Justin, and there is 


3 Καὶ τῇ τοῦ Ἡλίου λεγομένῃ ἡμέρᾳ 
πάντων κατὰ πόλεις ἢ ἀγροὺς μενόν- 
των ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτὸ συνέλευσις γίνεται, 
καὶ τὰ ἀπομνημονεύματα τῶν ἀπο- 
στόλων ἢ τὰ συγγράμματα τῶν 
προφητῶν μέχρις 
ἐγχωρεῖ. Apol.i. cap. lxvii. ; Von 
Otto, i. 184-186. 


΄ ΄ a 
4 ἐν τοῖς ἀπομνημονεύμασι τῶν 


» 
ἀναγινώσκεται 


ἀποστόλων γέγραπται προσελθὼν 
αὐτῷ καὶ πειράζων μέχρι τοῦ εἰπεῖν 
αὐτῷ Then follows a citation 
from Matt. iv. 9, 10. Dial. cap. 
ciii. ; ibid. i. 872. Cf. another 
reference to this chapter infra. 

5 ἐν τοῖς ἀπομνημονεύμασι TOV 


ἀποστόλων αὐτοῦ. Dial. cap. ¢. ; 
ibid. i. 356. 

ὁ Dial. cap. ci. ad fin., The 
mockery on the cross, Ps. xxii. 
Ibid. i. 362. 

7 Dial. cap. cii., The silence 
before Pilate. Ibid. i. 364. 

® Dial. cap. civ., The prophe- 
cies of Ps. xxii. 15-18. bid. i. 
374. 

® Kat 
αὐτὸν Πέτρον ἕνα τῶν ἀποστόλων, 
καὶ γεγράφθαι ἐν τοῖς ἀπομνημονεύμα- 
owavtov... Dial. cap. cvi., Mark 
111, 16, 17 ; ibid. i. 380. See esp. 
Von Otto’s note 10 in loc. 


» »" ΄ 
τὸ εἰπεῖν μετωνομακέναι 


LECTURE II. 67 
every reason to think with Von Otto that the reading 
is wrong, and that the word ‘his’ should be ‘ their,’ 
referring to the preceding ‘ Apostles,’ or, better still, 
that ‘ Apostles’ has dropped out. With this emen- 
dation it becomes another instance of ‘memoirs of 
His Apostles,’ forms of which we have just noted in 
this immediate context. 

The Memoirs are further described in two impor- 
tant passages :— 

They who have written memoirs of all things which 
relate to our Lord Jesus Christ .. |! 


In the memoirs which I say were composed by His 
Apostles and those who followed them . . .? 


The first reflection which will occur on examin- 
ing these quotations is, 1 think, that Justin regards 
the Memoirs as a whole, and that he regards them 
as an authoritative written record of the life of our 
Lord. To them, and to them only, is the appeal made. 
They are ‘memoirs of all things which relate to our 
Lord Jesus Christ.’ 

The description of the Sunday service, moreover, 
shows that the Memozrs are regarded as sacred books. 
They are read—and it is clear from the context that 
a general use is referred to, not that of any particular 
church—together with the writings of the Prophets. 


> A “ > 
* Ἔν yap Tots ἀπομνημονεύμασιν, 
[ἢ ς A “ > “a 
a φημι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀποστόλων αὐτοῦ 


1 ὡς οἱ ἀπομνημονεύσαντες πάντα 
τὰ περὶ τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ 
Χριστοῦ ἐδίδαξαν, . . . Apol. 1. 
cap. Xxxiil., where the corre- 
sponding verb is used; ibid. i. 
102. 


\ ~ > , 4 
καὶ τῶν ἐκείνοις παρακολουθησάντων 
συντετάχθαι, . . . Dial. cap. ciii. ; 


ibid. i. 372. ; 


τ Ὁ 


Memoirs 
further 
described: 


con- 
sidered as, 


a written 
record 

of the 
Lord, 


sacred 
books, 


of 
Apostolic 


authority, 


coming 
from the 
Lord. 


Use by 
Tertul- 
lian, 


68 LECTURE IL. 


They are placed in order before the writings of the 
Prophets, and had obtained therefore the position of 
first in honour and importance. It will not escape 
notice, though the line of thought must not now be 
followed, that this position of the Memozrs carries 
any possible date which can be assigned to them, to 
a time long before that of which Justin is speaking. 

Another obvious reflection is, that in Justin’s 
thought there lies behind these M/emozrs the authority 
of the Apostles. They are to him not only ‘memoirs,’ 
but ‘memoirs of the Apostles.’ And behind the 
Apostles there lies the authority of the Lord. They 
are not only ‘memoirs of the Apostles,’ but ‘memoirs 
of His Apostles,’ ‘memoirs composed by His 
Apostles, and those who followed them.’ The 
student will find that the successive steps by which 
all teaching is traced through the Apostles to the 
Lord Himself are quite as certain, if not quite so 
definitely expressed, as they are in the passages of 
Tertullian which were quoted in the last lecture.® 
He will need therefore no guidance to an answer, 
if he should meet with the assertion that Justin 
derived any part of his doctrine from human teachers, 
as, for example, the doctrine of the Logos from the 
pages of Philo ; no guidance, I mean, other than the 
pages of Justin himself. 

This reference to Tertullian brings another 
thought in its tram. We know what Gospels he 
used, and how he traced them back in the unity of 


3 Lecture I. pp. 24 sqq. 


LECTURE II. 69 


the Church’s life and teaching to the Lord Himself. 
We know, too, what language [reneus used about 
the four-fold Gospel, and the Gospel according to S. 
John, and we remember that Tertullian is a witness 
from Rome, and that Ireneus is a witness from 
Ephesus and Rome as well as from Lyons. But 
Ephesus is the scene of the Dialogue with Trypho, 
and Rome is the place where both the Apology and 
the Dialogue were written. And Irenzeus was for 
a quarter of a century a contemporary of Justin, and 
probably at one time ἃ fellow-citizen with him in 
Rome. In any case he was in immediate contact with 
his life and work, and had a full and exact know- 
ledge of his writings ; for in the work of Irenzus 
Against Heresies, the Apology and Dialogue are quoted 
or referred to at least thirty times.* Tertullian’s 
references to Justin are known to be still more full, 
and his works were used also by Tatian, Athenagoras, 
Theophilus, Minucius Felix, Melito.° 
The works of Justin are then in familiar use 
by his contemporaries and followers. For the most 
prominent of these writers, the four Gospels stand 
out as clearly as they do for Origen or Eusebius. 
Is it, therefore, within any possible limits of even 
an unbeliever’s credulity, that [renzeus should be 
minutely acquainted with Justin, should know all 
4 Cf. Adv. Her. iv. 6. 2, καὶ See the list in Von Otto’s Index 
καλῶς “lovativos ἐν τῷ πρὸς Map- iv. Corpus, tom. 11. pp. 595-6; and 
κίωνα συντάγματι φησίν, and v. 26. WVonGebhardt und Hurnack, Texte 


2, καλῶς 6 ᾿Ιουστῖνος ἔφη. Ed. wid Untersuchungen, Bd. 1. p. 181. 
Harvey, tom. ii. pp. 158 and 396. ° See Von Otto, ut supra. 


Irenzus, 
and 
others. 


Identified 
therefore 
with the 
four 
Gospels. 


This 
proved by 
Tatian’s 
Diates- 
saron. 


70 LECTURE IL. 


about the Memoirs of the Apostles, the Memoirs of His 
Apostles, the Memoirs composed by them which are 
called Gospels, the Memoirs which are read on the day 
called Sunday, the Memoirs which were composed by 
His Apostles and those who followed them, the Memoirs 
of all things which relate to our Lord Jesus Christ, and 
should, without one word to indicate the change, 
write all that he does write about the four-fold 
Gospel and S. John, unless he himself believed, and 
meant his readers to believe, that the four Gospels 
are identical with the Memoirs of which Justin speaks 
so much, and that the Gospel according to ὃ. John 
was widely read with the others in Church services 
between the years a.p. 130-140 ? I will not waste 
time by asking a similar question about Tertullian, 
because I have already with some fulness quoted his 
language,® and that language read in the light of 
his use of Justin, and of his connexion with Rome, 
leaves no possible room for doubt. Nor will I seek to 
answer questions which have sometimes been asked 
about the interval between Justin and Irenzus, be- 
cause in the truest sense there was no such interval. 
Corporations do not die. The corporate life of the 
Church flows ever on. 

But one visible link is so striking that 1t must 
not be passed over. Tatian’s relation to modern 
criticism will meet us again,’ but the great fact 
which seems to be now established beyond question, 
that Tatian, the pupil of Justin, composed a har- 


ὁ Cf. Lecture I. pp. 24 sqq. 7 Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 375 sqq. 


LECTURE II. Vai 


mony—a Diatessaron—of four Gospels, which are 
practically identical with our own, is, apart from 
every other consideration, sufficient to show what 
writings were included under the term, Memoirs of 
the Apostles. 'The Diatessaron of Tatian is the key 
to the Memoirs of Justin. 

In one of the passages which I have quoted ὃ from 
the Apology, Justin himself identifies the Memoirs 
with the Gospels—‘the Memoirs . which are 
called Gospels.’? Some attempts have been made 
to invalidate the force of this identification by sup- 
posing the words to be a gloss; but there is no 
MS. authority for doubting their genuineness,’ and 
In the 
Dialogue, a passage which is apparently quoted from 
S. Matthew is referred to as ‘ written in the Gospel ;’” 
and in another place Trypho speaks of the Christian 
precepts which are contained ‘in the so-called Gospel.’® 
The fact seems to be that Trypho is acquainted with 
one or more of the individual writings which col- 
lectively formed the ‘ Gospel,’ their use as lessons 
being probably the bridge by which the term passed 
from the good news which the writings contained, 
to the writings themselves, and to him, as a student 
of them, Justin uses the term (Gospel; while in 


they are quite in accord with Justin’s usage. 


8 Cf. supra, p. 65. 

® Apol. i. cap. lxvi.; Von Otto, 
Corpus, i. 182. 

1 «Forte sunt qui audacter illa 
verba expungerent ac sibi gratu- 
larentur de emendatione. Sane 
Schleiermachero (Hinl. ins N. T. 


Ber. 1845, p. 71) glossam videntur 
olere. Verum nihil muto.’ Von 
Otto, ὧν loc. note 5. 

4, Dial. caps ex; Vom Otto, i. 
p. 356; Matt. xi. 27. Cf. Luke 
Χ ae 

3 Dial. cap. x.; rbid. p. 38. 


The 
identifica- 
tion is 
made by 
Justin, 


and 
known to 
Irenzus, 
and 
others. 


Fourth 
Gospel 
certainly 
included 
in the 
Memoirs. 


ΤᾺ LECTURE II. 


other portions of the Dialogue, in the presence 
of Trypho’s friends, he uses the term Memoirs. 
But in the Apology, the regular term for the outside 
world is Memoirs, which in this instance he identifies 
with the Gospels of the inner Christian circle. In 
the same way he explains ‘ Baptism ’°—the word itself 
not occurring in the Apology, though not infrequent 
in the Dialogue—‘ Eucharist,’* ‘Christos,’? and the 
technical use of ‘ brethren.’ ° 

Irenzus,’ and Tertullian, when they wrote so 
much about the Gospels, and used so fully this 
Apology of Justin’s, were perfectly aware that while 
he employed the term Memoirs in addressing out- 
siders, he and other Christians used the term Gospels, 


or, to express the unity of a collected plurality, 


Gospel ; and that he formally asserted the two sets of 
writings to be identical. The (Gospels of Ireneus 
and Tertullian are thus further identified with the 
Memoirs of Justin. 

If these general statements are accepted, there 
remains no question about Justin’s use of the Fourth 
Gospel. It is included in the Memoirs, which were 
read in the services of the Church. It would seem 
then to be an idle task to inquire whether in this 
short Apology to Gentiles, for whom the elementary 
terms of the Christian life have to be explained, 


ὁ Apol. i. cap. lxi. ; Von Otto, 6. Apol. cap. Ixv. ; ibid. p. 176- 
Corpus, pp. 162 sqq. 180. 

* Apol. cap. lIxvi.; ibid. p. 7 Cf. Zahn, Geschichte des 
180-182. Neutestamentlichen Kanons, 1889, 


5 


Apol. cap. xxx. ; ibid. p. 90. Bd. i. 2 Hiilfte, p. 467. 


ΠῚ 


LECTURE II. 79 


there are any references to the most spiritual repre- 
sentation of the doctrine of Christ; or whether in 
this Dialogue with an ideal Jew, his attention will 
be formally directed to the writing which, more 
than any other, had tolled the knell of an exclu- 
sive Judaism. The task, moreover, has been very 
adequately performed by others, as we shall see, and 
my own special duty in these lectures is to estimate 
modern criticism, not to add to it. 

I will therefore pass over a somewhat full ex- 
amination of the pages of Justin, which I had myself 
made for this purpose, and that the more gladly as 
a minute comparison of texts is not easily presented 
in a ‘sermon-lecture,’ and will ask you to consider 
some results of the more recent critical investigations 
of this question. Part of them will be thought by 
some persons whom my words may reach to be much 
more authoritative than any induction which could 
be made by a Bampton Lecturer. 

Herr Albrecht Thoma is one of the ablest 
opponents of the view that ὃ. John wrote the 
Fourth Gospel. In the year 1875 he discussed in 
two long and important articles in Hilgenfeld’s Review, 
the relation of Justin to Paul and the John-Gospel.® 
The article devoted to 8. John occupies seventy- 
five closely-printed pages, and includes a detailed 
examination of every chapter. The writer is not 
convinced that Ὁ. John is included in the Alemoirs— 
he does not approach this question, as we have done, 


8 Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaftliche Theologie, 1875, xix. pp. 490-565. 


Recent 
investiga- 
tions: 


Herr 
Albrecht 
Thoma, 


T4 LECTURE II. 


from the side of history—nor yet that he is quoted as 
an authoritative historical source ; but taking chapter 
by chapter, and verse by verse, he finds what he calls 
a ‘literary community of goods’? which leaves, in 
his opinion, no room for doubt that Justin knew 
and used 8. John. To adopt Herr Thoma’s own 
expressive phrase :— 

He cites the Synoptists, he thinks and argues according to 
John.! 

Again :— 


John is to the Martyr no historic writing in the sense 
of the Synoptists. It is to him no book of history, but much 
more a manual from which he draws precious materials for 
his Christology.? 


Again :— 


The Fourth Gospel is to Justin in a similar position to 
that of the Epistles [of S. Paul]. 


The final conclusion is that :— 


As a manual of Christian gnosis, but not as a source of 
historical knowledge, it may after all be called a ‘ Gospel,’ 
and we may place it among the Gospels.! 


9. *Hine literarische Giiterge- 
meinschaft.’ Zeitschrift, ut supra, 
p. 545. 

' “Die Synoptiker citirt er, nach 
Johannes denkt und argumen- 
tirt er.’ Ibid. p. 554. 

* ‘Johannes ist dem Miirtyrer 
keine historische Schrift im 
Sinne der Synoptiker, kein Ge- 
schichtsbuch, er ist ihm vielmehr 
ein Lehrbuch, aus dem er schiitz- 
bares Material fiir seine Christo- 


logie herausholt.’? Ibid. pp. 557, 
558. 

5 * Das vierte Evangelium steht 
Justin auf gleicher Linie, wie die 
Episteln.’ Ibid. p. 558. 

* © Als Lehrbuch der christlichen 
Gnosis, aber nicht als Quelle 
geschichtlicher Erkenntniss, mag 
man’s auch immerhin ein ‘‘ Evan- 
gelium” nennen und unter die 
Evangelien stellen.’ Ibid. p. 565. 


LECTURE II. 70 


Dr. Adolf Hilgenfeld is probably the best known 
living representative of the negative Tiibingen school, 
and his Review, from which I have just quoted, took 
the place of Baur and Zeller’s Tiibingen Year-book, 
and has been for more than thirty years the leading 
exponent of what has been considered to be advanced 
teaching. In 1875 he published a critical and 
learned Introduction to the New Testament, 11 which 
he sums up the results of his previous studies. In 
this work he admits the difficulty of denying Justin’s 
use of the Fourth Gospel, and adds :— 

I have long recognized the possibility of Justin’s acquaint- 
ance with the John-Gospel.’ .. . 

Dr. Ezra Abbot, an American divine, whose too 
early death in 1884 was regarded on both sides of 
the Atlantic as a severe loss to the science of criti- 
cism, published in 1880 a work on the Authorship of 
the Fourth Gospel,® which was republished last year, 
in a volume of Dr. Abbot’s collected papers. Nearly 
all subsequent writers on the subject have acknow- 
ledged their indebtedness to this essay. Perhaps no 
other portion of it is so valuable as that in which, 
with all the microscopic exactness and care of a 
laboratory, he analyses, examines, and weighs the 
quotations in Justin. This is how he states the 
results of his examination :— 


We are authorized then, I believe, to regard it as in the 
highest degree probable, if not morally certain, that in the 
> Historisch-kritische Einleitung 5 Authorship of the Fourth 


in das Neue Testament, 1875, p. Gospel. Haternal Evidences, 1880. 
67. 


Dr. Adolf 
Hilgen- 
feld, 


Dr. Ezra 
Abbot, 


Professor 
James 
Drum- 
mond, 


76 LECTURE IL. 


time of Justin Martyr the Fourth Gospel was generally 
received as the work of the Apostle John.’ 


It will add to the value of these results in the 
opinion of some persons, if they are reminded that 
Dr. Ezra Abbot was a professor in the University of 
Harvard, and that this essay was first read before the 
Ministers’ Institute, and was first printed in the 
Unitarian Review. 

On this side of the Atlantic we have been not 
less indebted on many questions connected with the 
Fourth Gospel to the patient investigations of a 
learned Unitarian minister. Professor James Drum- 
mond has the honour of being one of the few English 
theologians who are stated, in an article which has 
attained some celebrity,® to be in the van of modern 
progress. He has the much higher honour of 
worthily filling an office which was made great by 
the intellectual and moral stature of Dr. James 
Martineau. Professor Drummond discussed the re- 
lation of Justin to the Fourth Gospel in three articles 
in an English Unitarian quarterly, The Theological 
Review, in October 1875,? and in April and July 
1877.1 Dr. Ezra Abbot has expressed what is, 1 
believe, the general estimate of these articles, m the 


7 Authorship, ut supra, p. 80. 1 Ibid. vol. xiv. pp. 155, 829. 
8. Mrs. Humphry Ward, The Cf. also Prof. Drummond’s inte- 
New Reformation: Nineteenth resting review of Von Engel- 
Century, March 1889, p. 468,  hardt’s Das Christenthum Justin’s 
note. des Mértyrers. Ibid. vol. xvi. pp. 


® Theological Review, vol. xii. 365 sqq. 
pp. 471-488. 


LECTURE II. ΓΜ 


following words which he applied to the first of the 
series :— 


He has treated the question with the ability, candor, and 
cautious accuracy of statement which distinguish his writings 
generally.? 


The evidence of Professor Drummond as a wit- 
ness should have therefore exceptional weight in de- 
termining our opinion. It is expressed in language 
which is clear and definite :— 


It does seem to me surprising that anyone, in comparing 
the passages in Justin and John, should doubt for one moment 
that the dependence is on the side of the former. John has 
all the impress of original genius, and gives his thoughts 
with the terse suggestiveness of one who for the first time 
commits them to writing. Justin never rises above the level 
of a prosy interpreter of other people’s ideas.* 


On another page he says :— 


There are two hypotheses by which to account for the 
quotation in Justin: 4 (1) that a Gospel which in the genera- 
tion after Justin was, as we know, confidently believed to 
have been in existence for the greater part of a century, was 
really in existence sufficiently early to be used by Justin; 
and (2) that a Gospel with a precisely similar vein of thought, 
a Gospel which in the generation after Justin had passed out 
of ecclesiastical use, and the very existence of which is merely 
inferred from the present quotation, was cited by Justin as 
an apostolical authority. The latter hypothesis, being framed 
for the express purpose, will of course explain the pheno- 
menon. If the reasoning in this paper be correct, the former 
hypothesis, framed not for the purpose, but on the ground 


* Authorship, ut supra, p. 34, 4 *Apol. i. c. 61,’ quoting John 
note. ili. 3-5. Cf. Von Otto, Corpus, i. 
3 Review, ut supra, vol.xii. p.483. pp. 164-166. 


Dr. 
Sanday, 


his view 
in 1876, 


78 LECTURE IL. 


of historic probability, also affords an adequate explanation of 
the facts. Surely, then, it is the part of sound criticism to 
accept an explanation which is founded upon what we know, 
instead of resorting to the boundless field of conjecture, where 
the severity of scientific study is in danger of being sacrificed 
to the facile pleasure of piling up shifting and unsubstantial 
hypotheses.” 


And he sums up the results of the last article as 
follows :— 

I must conclude, therefore, as best satisfying on the 
whole the conditions of the case, not only that Justin regarded 
the fourth Gospel as one of the historical Memoirs of Christ, 
but that it is not improbable that he believed in its Johannine 
authorship. This is a very old-fashioned conclusion; but I 
have endeavoured simply to follow the evidence without any 
ulterior object, and must leave the result to the judgment 
of the reader.® 


The writer of the article in the Nineteenth Century 
to which I just now referred, singled out our present 
Professor of Exegesis as another of the few English 
thinkers whose work was worthy of being classed with 
that of modern Germans. I agree so fully at least in 
the inclusive part of this opinion, that I will quote 
Dr. Sanday’s judgment on Justin’s relation to S. 
John. And first from his work on the Gospels in the 
Second Century :— 

‘The word became flesh,’ is the key by which Justin is 
made intelligible, and that key is supplied by the fourth 
Gospel. No other Christian writer had combined these two 


ideas before—the divine Logos, with the historical person- 
ality of Jesus. When therefore we find the ideas combined 


5. Theological Review, xii. wt supra, pp. 487 sq. 6 Ibid. xiv. p. 333. 


LECTURE II. 79 


as in Justin, we are necessarily referred to the fourth Gospel 
for them; for the strangely inverted suggestion of Volkmar, 
that the author of the fourth Gospel borrowed from Justin, 


is on chronological, if not on other grounds, certainly unten- 
able.’ 


In his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of the New 
Testament, delivered before this University in 1883, the 
Professor marks the advance which had taken place 
in the ten years which had passed since the publica- 
tion of his earlier work on the Authorship and His- 
torical Character of the Fourth Gospel, in 1872. Then 
he had excused himself from dealing with the ex- 
ternal evidences on the ground that the results were 
inconclusive. This cannot, he observes, be said now, 
and among other changes he notes that Justin gives 
no uncertain sound.’ He thinks also that the labours 
of the two scholars to whom 1 have referred, Dr. 
Ezra Abbot and Professor Drummond, had 


placed quite beyond question Justin’s acquaintance with the 
Gospel ; 


and he adds :— 


Greater importance attached to the opinions of Professor 
Drummond and Dr. Ezra Abbot, as they presented, perhaps, 
a nearer approach to rigid impartiality than had yet been 
seen in any English work dealing with the subject. Both 
these writers are Unitarians—the one English and the other 
American—and they are besides scholars, as it seems to me, of 
singularly calm and balanced judgment.® 


7 Gospels inthe Second Century, ° Inaugural Lectwre, 1883, pp. 
1876, p. 287. 28, 29. 


* Lbid: p. 8: 


his view 
in 1883, 


Dr. 
Westcott, 


80 LECTURE II. 


In addressing the Church Congress at Reading 
later in the same year, Dr. Sanday returned to the 
subject, and with special reference to the arguments 
urged upon the other side by Dr. Edwin A. Abbott? 
he writes :— 

I have been lately reading Justin again, with a view 
to test the force of this conclusion [that Justin regarded the 
Fourth Gospel as not possessing Apostolic authority]; and it 
is impressed upon me more forcibly than ever that Justin 
really implies the Fourth Gospel, and implies it, not only on 
the surface, but deep down in the substance of his thought. 
Frequently as Justin brings in the Logos doctrine, it is 
almost always in immediate connexion with the subject of 
the Incarnation. Page after page, time after time that the 
one is mentioned, the other immediately follows. ὁ λόγος 
σὰρξ ἐγένετο seems to be ringing in Justin’s ears. But these 
are the words of St. John and not of Philo.? 

I am not sure that the last witness whom I am 
about to quote, fared quite so well in the article which 
suggested those whom we have just heard, but few 
names will seem of more weight to many of those 
whom I am addressing than that of Dr. Westcott. 
His studies of Justin and of the whole field of critical 
and patristic learning are not of to-day or of yes- 
terday. It is now thirty-five years since the first 
edition of his work On the Canon of the New Testament 
was published, and it is hardly too much to say that 
every leaflet which has appeared on this subject 
during all these years has had the fullest weight 
given to it in the sensitive balance of an exceptionally 


' Modern Review, July and October, 1882. 
* Official Report, 1883, p. 93. 


LECTURE II. 81 


exact and widely read scholar’s judgment. In 1881 
he writes :— 


It is unlikely that I shall ever again be able to revise 
what now stands written ; 


and under the impression—happily a mistaken one— 
that his pen was touching for the last time the work 
of his life from early manhood onwards, he says :— 
In one particular of some importance I have felt able 
after a fresh consideration of the evidence to speak more con- 
fidently than in former editions. There is, I think, no reason- 


able doubt that the writings of Justin Martyr shew that he 
was acquainted with the Gospel of St. John. 


I submit that in the remarkable consensus of 
opinion which [ have just quoted, there is a solid foun- 
dation for the belief that Justin knew and used the 
Fourth Gospel. I submit that it is anecessary deduc- 
tion from Justin’s clearly stated position in relation to 
the Apostolate, as the channel through which truth 
came to the Church from the divine Head, that he 
could not possibly have used the Fourth Gospel as a 
manual of doctrine without believing in its Apostolic 
origin. [ submit that in the historic nexus between 
Justin and Irenzus there is proof that the Gospels of 
the Church in a.p. 130-140 were the same as the 
Gospels of the Church in a.p. 170-180, and that 
the Fourth Gospel was certainly included. 

Shall I be asked by some of my younger hearers, 
‘Why, if Justin admitted the Fourth Gospel as he 

> On the Canon of the New Testament, Notice to ed. v. 1881, p. xliii ; 
ef. ed. vi. 1889, pp. xlii, xiii. 
G 


his view 
in 1881 


repeated 
in 1889. 


Consen- 
sus of 
opinion. 


Why 
Justin did 
not quote 


the 
Fourth 
Gospel 
more 
fully. 


Reasons 
suggested. 


82 LECTURE II. 


did the other two or three, did he not more fre- 
quently quote it for matters of fact ?’ ‘Why does 
he even seem to avoid a quotation which was ready 
to his hand in 8. John, to find a much less appro- 
priate one in ὃ. Matthew or 5. Luke?’ My answer 
is simply that I do not know. 

But I have already pointed out that a fully suffi- 
cient reason may be found in the characteristics of the 
writing and of the persons whom Justin addressed. 
It is possible that two or more of the synoptic 
Gospels had been formed into a harmony, such as we 
know was arranged by Justin’s pupil Tatian, in 
which the Fourth Gospel had not yet found a place. 
It is possible that a merely accidental reason made it 
difficult for Justin to have access at the moment to a 
roll which contained S$. John. It is possible Dr. 
Keim’s explanation is right, and that Justin did not 
make use of $. John because of its opposition to 
chiliastic doctrine.* It is admitted that the Fourth 
Gospel did not pass into circulation until much later 
than the others, and it is quite possible that it had 
not so fully left its mark on the distinctly Pauline 
church in Rome. All this is matter of more or 
less uncertainty. The fact is that we really know 
very little about Justin. He lived more than seven- 


4 *Tch zweifle nicht, dass ganz Schluss: ἐγὼ δὲ καὶ εἴ τινές εἰσιν 
vorziiglich der Bruch des Evan- ὀρθογνώμονες κατὰ πάντα Χριστιανοὶ, 
geliums mitdem Chiliasmus Justin καὶ σαρκὸς ἀνάστασιν γενήσεσθαι 
zuriickstiess. Hier ist Tryph. 80 ἐπιστάμεθα καὶ χίλια ἔτη ἐν Ἵερου- 
ungemein belehrend. So mild σαλὴμ, κ.τ.λ.᾽ Geschichte Jesu v. 
ersich ausdriickt gegen die Nicht- Nazara, i. p. 140. 

Chiliasten, so sagt er doch zum 


LECTURE IL. 83 


teen hundred years ago, and most of his writings have | 
been lost in the wreck of time. The Apologies with uxisting 
which we are dealing are but fragments which have bes 
been saved. But we know that he wrote other works ™™* 
which from their nature must have dealt more fully 

with questions like that of the Fourth Gospel; and 

we know with certainty what men thought who were 
contemporaries and immediate successors of Justin, 

and were familiarly acquainted with his books.’ The 
argument from ignorance is never worth much, but 

it is worth nothing in the presence of this full know- 


ledge. 


It is impossible to overrate the importance of the The 

testimony of Justin, but he no longer stands alone ana 
as a witness from the middle of the second century. 
While he is defending Christianity against heathen- 
ism, there are by his side in Rome, representatives 
of the extreme forms of Jewish-Christian teaching 
which meet us in the so-called Clementines ; and 
the rationalist Gnostic tendencies are represented by 
Valentinus on the one hand, and by Marcion on the 
other. ΑἹ] are in different ways evidence of the wide 
acceptance at that time of the Fourth Gospel. 

That the Clementine Homilies quote it, is scarcely They 
now a matter of opinion. Professor de Lagarde, in dhe 
the Prolegomena to his edition of the Clementina,® gives Gers 
fifteen instances of quotation from or reference to 8. 


John. The list is not quite complete and some of 


> Cf. supra, pp. 68 sqq. 6 Clementina, 1865, Preface, p. 30. 
; G2 


their 
probable 
date, 


84 LECTURE II. 


the instances are of little importance, but they are as 
a whole perfectly conclusive. Since the discovery 
of the complete MS. of the Homilies in 1853, to 
which we shall refer hereafter, their use of the 
Fourth Gospel has been recognized on all sides. The 
author of Supernatural Religion is of course not con- 
vinced, though even Strauss’ was, and Dr. Hilgen- 
feld has taken occasion, in a review of the work, to 
express his own dissent from the writer’s opinions, 
and his own belief that be will find no support for 
them in Germany or Switzerland. The question 
which we now have to ask about the Clementines is, 
not whether they quote ὃ. John, but what is their own 
date, and what is therefore the value of their evidence. 
Now we shall find that modern criticism has assigned 
them to almost every period of the second century. 
On the one hand a pillar of the papacy, and on the 
other hand one of the momenta in the development 
of Baur’s scheme of the history of doctrine, no 
writings have ever obtained a more entirely un- 
deserved fame, and no writings have ever been more 
subject to the baneful influence of extreme partisan- 
ship. Their date cannot yet be considered as settled ; 
but while the present Roman form is probably to be 
assigned to the latter half or even to the close of the 


7 Das Leben Jesu, 1864, p. 69. von Joh. 9, 1-3 unabhiingig sein 
Cf. Lectures IV. p. 210, and VII. sollte.’ Review of Supernatural 
pp. 374 sq. Religion, ed. vi. in Zeitschrift fiér 

δ. *In Deutschland und der’ wissenschaftliche Theologie 1875, 
Schweiz wird es kaum jemand xvii. p. 584. Cf. Hinlcitung 1875, 
glauben, dass Clem. Hom. xix. 22 p. 43, esp. note 1, and p. 734. 


LECTURE IL. 85 


century, the original form, Eastern in origin and 
Aramaic in language, cannot be later, and is probably 
much earlier, than the middle of the century. The 
student of these writings will remember their hardly- 
concealed antagonism to 5. Paul, and therefore to 
5. John, and will see that they are in the position of 
an unwilling witness. This makes them for our 
present purpose the more valuable ; as does the fact 
that, speaking in Rome and under the name of 
Clement, they are really the voice of the East 
speaking the language of the Elkesaites. 


Valentinus was the master of a school which 
promulgated the most profound and wide-spreading 
system of Gnosticism, and numbered among his disci- 
ples, Ptolemzus, Heracleon, Marcus, and Theodotus. 
He was probably by birth an Egyptian, by training 
an Alexandrian,’ and by residence a Cypriote, before 
he came to Rome, which he must have made his 
head-quarters between A.D. 138 and a.p. 160. He 
had not left the communion of the Church on his 
arrival in Rome,’ but while there, according to what 
seems to be the meaning of Ireneus,’ he flourished 
as a leader of his sect during the episcopate of Pius. 
What led to the separation we need not inquire. It 
may have had its root, as his opponents are not slow 

® Epiphanius, Heres. xxxi. tom. li. ἢ. 34. 
cap. 2, Panaria; ed. Oehler, 2 Adv. Her. 1 iv. 2; ed. 
Corpus, tom. 11. pp. 306 sqq. Harvey, tom. 11. p. 17. Euse- 


1 Tertullian, De Prescriptione  bius, Hist. Eccles. iv. 11. 
Hereticorum, xxxvi. ; ed. Oehler, 


their 
evidence. 


Valen- 
tinus, 
fl. 138-60. 


Followers 
form two 
schools: 


In the 
East : 


86 LECTURE II, 


to tell us, in the disappointed ambition of an able 
man who saw his inferiors preferred to himself— 
a not infrequent cause of division in the Church, 
or of perverted critical judgment; or it may be that 
here, as certainly in other instances, the apologists of 
the second century have set the unhappy example to 
their successors in later years, of imputing motives 
which had no real existence. Whatever the cause 
may have been, it is obvious that, as a witness to 
the use of the Fourth Gospel, Valentinus is of the 
greater value to us just because he speaks from both 
sides of this cleavage. 

Let us remind ourselves that the witness of his 
followers is also of the greater value, because they 
were divided into two schools—one spreading over 
Syria and Egypt, the other and chief division having 
its centre in Rome and its extensions through Italy 
and Gaul. 

From the East come the HLacerpta Theodoti and 
Doctrina Orientalis, a series of extracts with cri- 
ticisms, ascribed to Clement of Alexandria and 
printed in his works, which contain frequent quota- 
tions from 8. John.’ 


5. Ἔκ τῶν Θεοδότου καὶ τῆς ava- of the Analecta Antenicaena 


τολικῆς καλουμένης διδασκαλίας ἐπι- 
τομα. Fabricius, Bibliotheca 
treca, tom. v. pp. 194-178. 
Clem. Alex. Opp. ed. Dindorf, iii. 
pp. 424 sqq. ‘The only useable 
edition (along with the older edi- 
tions of Sylburg and Potter) is 
that of Bunsen in the first volume 


(London, 1854), pp. 205-278. ... 
Clemens made use of a Valen- 
tinian writing, which appealed to 
Theodotus as its chief authority.’ 
Lipsius, art. Valentinus in Smith 
and Wace’s Dictionary of Christian 
Biography, iv. p. 1082. Cf. esp. 
Heinrici, Die Valentinianische 


LECTURE II. δ᾽ 


From the West we have Ptolemeus and Hera- 
cleon. Ptolemzeus was among the earliest disciples 
of Valentinus and lived on to the time of Irenzus, 
who represents him as the head of a party. It was 
from the commentaries of these disciples of Valen- 
tinus, and from personal intercourse with some of 
them, that Irenzeus obtained his own knowledge of 
the subject; and it was to counteract the then 
existing form of the heresy—namely, the school of 
Ptolemzeus, which he describes as an offshoot of that 
of Valentinus—that he devoted his great work.* One 
section at least is an extract from Ptolemeus him- 
self? This is a connected exposition of part of 
the Prologue of 8. John, who is referred to as 
‘John the disciple of the Lord,’ and it ends with 
the words, ‘et Ptolemeeus quidem ita.’® A little 
earlier in the same chapter there is a quotation with 
an interpretative change of text by which our Lord’s 
question ‘ Now is my soul troubled ; and what shall 
I say ?’ becomes ‘(When He said) What I shall say, 
I know not.’ ? 
Ptolemeus to Flora which is preserved by Epiphanius,* 


There is also extant an Lpisile of 


Gnosis und die Heilige Schrift, pp. 
88 sqq. ; and Zahn, Forschungen 
w.s.W. 111. Ὁ. 122. 

4 Adv. Her. i. Preface, § 2; 
ed. Harvey, tom. i. p. 5. 

5 Ibid. i. 8, § 5; ed. Harvey, 
tom. i. p. 80. 

7 ἐν τῷ εἰρηκέναι" καὶ Ti εἴπω 
οὐκ οἶδα; Adv. Her. i. 8, ὃ 2 ad 
jin. ; ed. Harvey, tom. i. p. 70. 

8 Her. xxxiii. 3-7 : ed. Oehler, 


ὁ These words occur in the 
contemporaneous Latin, but there 
is no equivalent in the Greek or 
in the account of Epiphanius 
(Her. xxxiii.) which is based on 
it. It is certain, however, that it 
is Ptolemzeus who is quoted. 


νῦν ἡ Ψυχή μου τετάρακται, καὶ 
τί εἴπω; John xii. 27. 


Corpus, tom. ii. pp. 400-412. 


In the 
West: 


Ptole- 
meeus and 
Hera- 
cleon, 

ΠΕ 
170-180. 


Evidence 
of 
Irenzus, 


of Epi- 
phanius, 


of Cle- 
ment and 
Origen, 


88 LECTURE IL. 


and in which the words ‘ All things were made by 
Him, and without Him was not anything made,’ are 
quoted with the formula ‘ The Apostle saith.’ ® 

Dr. Hilgenfeld, to whom we are indebted for the 
most careful edition of this Letter to Flora,’ and whose 
negative position will not escape your memory, recog- 
nizes the unhesitating acceptance of 8. John by the 
Valentinians.” 

Irenzeus mentions Heracleon in immediate con- 
nexion with Ptolemeus,® and Clement calls him ‘the 
most esteemed representative of the school of Valen- 
tinus;’* Origen tells us that he was an acquaintance 
of Valentinus,’? using the same term which Ireneus 
applies to Ptolemeus. Now Heracleon wrote the 
first known commentary on ὃ. John, large portions 
of which have been preserved by Origen,° and have 
been collected by Grabe,’ and in a more convenient 


form by Hilgenfeld.® 


These extracts give comments 


9 " A a , ὃ Α ὃ 3 > i Sa \ 
ετι γε THY του κοσμου ημι- TavTa t auTouvu EVEVETO, και 


ουργίαν ἰδίαν λέγει εἶναι (dre πάντα χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν, 
δ᾽ αὐτοῦ γεγονέναι, καὶ χωρὶξ Johni. 3. 
αὐτοῦ γεγονέναι οὐδέν) ὁ ἀπό- 
otodos,. . . Ptolemxi ad Floram 
Epist. 1. Ὁ. a ὃ 45. Epiphanius, 
Her. xxxili. ed. Oehler, ut supra, 


p. 402. 


1 Hilgenfeld, Zeitschrift fiir 
wissenschaftliche Theologie, 1881, γνώριμον Ἡρακλέωνα. 


A > ¢ , > 
τὸν Οὐαλεντίνου λεγόμενον εἶναι 


Origen In 


pp. 214-230. Joannem, tom. ii. 8. 
? Ibid. Ὁ. 230. δ In Joannem, ut supra. 
* Adv. Ter, (ti; (A Ae) ee: 7 Spicilegium, ed. 2, 1714, tom. 


Harvey, tom. i. p. 259. 
4 Strom. iv. 9. 73; ed. Klotz, 
tom. ii. p. 316. 


ii. pp. 87 sqq. and 237 sqq. 
8 Ketzergeschichte, uw. s.wW., pp. 
472-498. 


LECTURE II. 89 


on passages of considerable length, and it is certain 
that the author of them regarded the text which he 
was expounding as of divine authority. 

The evidence which is furnished by Hippolytus, of of Hippo- 
whom I shall have to speak more fully in a subsequent "* 
lecture,’ to the use of the Fourth Gospel by the Valen- 
tinians is also clear. When we read, ‘On this account, 
he says, the Saviour says, “‘ All that came before me 
are thieves and robbers,”’’! we have no doubt that the 
writer is quoting 8. John, as he is also when he 
uses the familiar Johannine phrase ‘ the ruler of this 
world,’ ? 

But while this is positive evidence for the Valenti- 
nians, itis not quite certain that Valentinus is person- 
ally quoted by the formula ‘he says.’ The context 
however makes it in the highest degree probable that 
it is the founder of the school to whom reference is 
made ; and we shall find later that the probability is 
strengthened by a similar method of reference to 
Basilides.® 


® Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 365 sqq. 


and 392 sq. 
1 Διὰ τοῦτο, φησί, λέγει 6 cwrnp’ πάντες ὅσοι ἦλθον πρὸ 
, c A > “ 2 > “ ’ > ‘ Ἀ 
Πάντες οἱ πρὸ ἐμοῦ ἐληλυ- ἐμοῦ κλέπται εἰσὶν καὶ 
μ η μ 


θότες κλέπται καὶλῃσταὶ εἰσί. λῃσταί: Johnx. 8. 
Hippolytus, fefutatio Omniwm 

Heresium, vi. 35; ed. Duncker 

et Schneidewin, p. 284. 


2 διάβολος, ὁ ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμον νῦν 6 ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμου τούτου 
τούτου,. .. Ut supra, vi. 389, ἐκβληθήσεται ἔξω: John xii. 31. 
p. 280. Cf. John xiv. 30 and xvi. 11. 


ὁ διάβολος δὲ ὁ ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμου, 
. Ut supra, vi. 34, p. 282. 
5. Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 370 sqq. 


Testi- 
mony 

of Valen- 
tinus to 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


The Val- 
entinians 
a school. 


The 
Catholics 
also a 
school, 


90 LECTURE IL. 


But that the system of Valentinus himself, and 
the names of the wons as expressed in the well- 
known passage of Irenzeus in the eleventh chapter 
of his first book, which is probably based upon an 
earlier written statement,’ implies the Fourth Gospel, 
just as do the thirty eons of the Ptolemean systems 
in the first chapter, would seem to be beyond all possi- 
bility of doubt were it not for the fact that it has been 
doubted. The question really is, Which comes first, 
germ or development, the simple or the compound, 
the source or the stream ?° 

The Valentinians, moreover, form aschool. Pto- 
lemzeus and Heracleon were, as we have seen, personal 
disciples of the master, and the teaching of master 
and pupils forms a whole, developing indeed but 
homogeneous, which occupied much of the _ best 
thought of the second century from the fourth de- 
cennium onwards. ‘Through its whole history this 
teaching implies the Fourth Gospel. A caricature 
presupposes an original. 

And as the school is one, so also the Catholics 
who oppose it are one. ‘Tertullian tells us that the 
opinions of these heretics had been met in careful 
works by holy men who had lived before himself, 
and that some indeed were contemporaries of the 
heresiarchs. He names, as we should expect, Justin, 
the philosopher and martyr, and Irenzeus, the minute 


* Cf. esp. Lipsius; art. Valen- tin. Gnosis, ut supra, p. 40. 
tis in Smith and Wace’s Dic- 5. Cf. Hxcursus A. (Watkins) in 
tionary of Christian Biography, iv.  Ellicott’s New Testament Com- 
p- 1080 ; and Heinrici, Die Valen- mentary, 1879, p. 552. 


LECTURE II. 9] 


investigator of all doctrines, and includes also Mil- 
tiades whom he calls the sophist of the churches, and 
Proculus the Montanist, of chaste old age and 
eloquence. We remember that Irenzeus was the 
younger contemporary of Justin, whose works he 
knew well and quotes frequently, and Hippolytus 
was the disciple of Ireneus. But among the works 
written by Justin, which are not now extant, was a 
Syntagma against all Heresies, which may with very 
great probability be taken to be the chief source 
from which later writers derived their knowledge of 
the heresies of Justin’s time, and may especially be 
assumed to be the written source from which Irenzeus 
is drawing, in his account of Valentinus.’ Ter- 
tullian, moreover, had the works of both Justin and 
Irenzeus before him, and his treatise Against the 
Valentinians is little more than an expansion of the 
account in Ireneus. Justin, Ireneus, and Tertullian 
are a triad of Catholics, as Valentinus, Ptolemzus, 
and Heracleon are a triad of Gnostics. 

We are now in a position therefore to estimate the 
bearing of the following general statements :— 

Irenzeus speaks of ‘those who are followers of 
Valentinus and make very full use of the gospel 
which is according to John.’ .. .° 

Tertullian contrasts Valentinus and Marcion in 


® Adversus Valentinianos, cap. Hist. Hecles.iv. 11. Cf. Caspari, 


v.; ed. Oehler, tom. ii. p. 387. Quellen zur Geschichte des Tauf- 
7 Justin, Apol. i. 26, 58; symbols, 111. 363, note 171. 
Ireneus, Adv. Her. iv. 6, 2, ed. 8 “Hi autem qui a Valentino 


Harvey, tom. ii. 158; Eusebius, sunt, eo quod est secundum 


State- 
ments by 
Irenzus, 


and Ter- 
tullian. 


Conclu- 
sion as to 
use of 
Gospel by 
Valen- 
tinus. 


92 LECTURE II. 

their use of Scripture, in that while the latter used 
the knife and not the pen, Valentinus perverted the 
truth by misinterpretation, but accepted ‘ the whole 
instrument.’ ® 


The conclusion which the inquirer for truth will 
draw is, 1 think, not less than this: that, while we 
cannot consider some of the subsidiary arguments to 
be beyond doubt, the general position of the Valen- 
tinian school of Gnostics in relation to the Fourth 
Gospel is fully established, and that this evidence 
carries it back to a time earlier than the division 
from the Catholic Church. Here Theodotus is one 
with Clement; Heracleon is one with Tertullian ; 
Ptolemy is one with Ireneus ; Valentinus is one 
with Justin. Here the unity of a school of dissi- 
dents is one with the unity of the Catholic Church, 
in the higher unity of their earlier communion ; 


Johannem plenissime utentes. . .’ 


Adv. Her. iii. 11.7; ed. Harvey, 


proprietates singulorum quoque 
verborum et adiciens  disposi- 


tom. ii. 46. tiones non comparentium rerum.’ 
® ¢ Alius manu scripturas, alius Tertullian, De Prescr. Heret. 
sensus expositione intervertit. xxxvill. ; ed. Oehler, tom. ii. p. 


Neque enim si Valentinus integro 
instrumento uti videtur, non calli- 
diore ingenio quam  Marcion 
manus intulit veritati. Marcion 
enim exerte et palam machzra, 
non stilo usus est, quoniam ad 
materiam suam czdem scriptu- 
rarum confecit : Valentinus autem 
pepercit, quoniam nonad materiam 
scripturas, sed materiam ad scrip- 
turas excogitavit, et tamen plus 
abstulit et plus adiecit, auferens 


36. Cf. ibid. xxx. ; and De Resur- 
rectione Carnis, Ixiii., ed. Oehler, 
tom. 11. p. 550. 

For meaning of videtwr= con- 
stat, cf. Oehler’s note in loc., and 
especially Adv. Mare. iv. 2 ; ibid. 
11. p. 162. ‘Lucam videtur Mar- 
cion elegisse quem ceederet.’ 

For meaning of instrwmentwm = 
testumentum, cf. Lecture I. p. 26, 
note 6, 


LECTURE II. 93 


and in that unity they accepted the Gospel according 
to Ὁ. John. 


Marcion was also a contemporary and fellow- 
citizen with Justin. The commencement of his work 
in Rome may be placed at a.p. 139-142. His 
gospel is admitted to have been a mutilated S. 
Luke, and we do not look for any traces of 5. John, 
though it is not quite certain that these are wholly 
absent.’ The questions which meet us here are such 
as these: ‘ Why was 5. John not chosen?’ ‘ Would 
not the Fourth Gospel have suited Marcion’s purpose 
better than 8. Luke ?’ ‘Is not the fact that he 
rejected it, so far evidence that it was not at that date 
regarded as Apostolic and authoritative ?’ These 
questions are to be answered in part by a careful 
comparison of the teaching of Marcion with that of 
S. John. The one is through and through opposed 
to Judaism and to the Old Testament; the other 
presents a Gospel which has grown indeed as a tree 
whose leaves are for the healing of the nations, but 
all its roots are in the Jewish Scriptures. And in part 
we find the answer in Marcion’s principle of selection 
as it is described by Tertullian. We read, for ex- 


ample, that ‘ when Marcion observed how ὃ. Paul in τ 


the Epistle to the Galatians rebukes even Apostles 
for not walking according to the truth, and accuses 
false Apostles of perverting the Gospel of Christ, he 
endeavoured to destroy the position of the Gospels 


1 Cf. Zahn, Geschichte des Neutestamentlichen Kanons, 1889, i. pp. 
678 sq. 


Marcion, 


fl. 
139-142. 


Testi- 
mony of 
er- 
tullian, 


and 
Trenezus. 


94 LECTURE IL. 


which are peculiar to and published under the names 
of Apostles or persons immediately connected with 
them.’ 5. John is named in the context, and it 
follows that, in Tertullian’s opinion, Marcion rejected 
the Fourth Gospel, not because it was not Apostolic, 
but because it was.” 

In another passage Tertullian addresses Marcion 
in these words :— 
If you had not carefully rejected some of the scriptures 


which disprove your views and corrupted others, the Gospel 
of John would have confounded you in this instance.? 


It is probable that Tertullian is following Irenzeus * 
in his treatise Against Marcion, as he certainly was in 
his treatise Against the Valentinians, and it seems to 
be certain, that both Irenzus and Tertullian assumed 
that Marcion knew and rejected the Fourth Gospel. 
They would not in controversial treatises have taken 
for granted that which their opponents might have 


9° 


2 Sed enim Marcion nactus 331, ad med.; ‘interpolatum a 


epistolam Pauli ad Galatas, etiam 
ipsos apostolos suggillantis ut non 
recto pede incedentesad veritatem 
evangelii, simul et accusantis 
pseudapostolos quosdam perver- 


‘tentes evangelium Christi, conni- 


titur ad destruendum statum 
eorum evangeliorum quee propria 
et sub  apostolorum nomine 
eduntur, vel etiam apostolicorum, 
αὖ scilicet fidem, quam _illis 
adimit, suo conferat.’? Tertullian, 
Adv. Marc. iv. 3; ed. Oecehler, 
tom. ii. p. 163, Cf. ‘ pseudapo- 
stoli nostri et Judaici evangeliza- 
tores.’ Adv. Marc. v. 19; ibid. p. 


protectoribus Judaismi.’ Ibid. 
iv. 4, p. 164, ad fin. 

8 51 scripturas opinioni tus 
resistentes non de industria alias 
reiecisses, alias corrupisses, con- 
fudisset te in hacspecieevangelium 
Joannis.’ De Carne Christi, iii. ; 
ed. Harvey, ii. p. 430. 

* Trenzeus certainly planned a 
treatise Against Marcion: ‘ Nos 
autem ex his que adhuc apud eos 
custodiuntur, arguemus eos, don- 
ante Deo, in altera conscriptione.’ 
Adv. Her. iii. 12. 12; ed. Har- 
vey, tom. il. p. 67. Cf. Eusebius, 
Hist. Eccles. v. 8. 


LECTURE II. 95 


at once disproved. The fact that they assumed his 
knowledge of the Gospel is itself proof of that know- 
ledge ; which indeed there is no real reason to doubt. 

Now Marcion was the son of a bishop of Sinope, 
in Pontus, and was so wide a traveller that Ter- 
tullian constantly calls him the ‘ship-master.’ His 
evidence, which is obtained only by the cross-exami- 
nation of an adverse witness, strikes therefore alto- 
gether independent veins of corroborative testimony. 


When we pass to the first generation of the second 
century, we have to do with persons many of whom 
had themselves been, and whose parents had been, 
contemporaries with $. John ; some of whom had been 
his converts and his personal acquaintances ; some 
of whom had been his disciples. Of the Christians 
who died during this generation, many would have 
known his hfe and work for from twenty to fifty 
years. Let us take an example. Polycarp’s martyr- 


The 
second 
century : 
The first 
genera- 
tion. 


Polycarp, 
c. 69- 


dom is now fixed by an increasing consensus of 155-6. 


critical authorities, to which we shall have to refer 
hereafter, at A.D. 155 or 156.° Before his death he 
testified that he had served Christ for eighty and 
six years. ‘This would place his birth not later than 
A.D. 69. 8. John lived on to the reign of Trajan; 
that is, he died not earlier than a.p. 98. Polycarp 
was then about thirty years old at the time of the 
Apostle’s death, and men who died during the first 
generation of the second century—that is, from thirty 


ὅ Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 389 sq. 


and 
Papias, 
fl. 130. 


Their 
writings. 


96 LECTURE IL. 


to fifty years earlier than Polycarp—might, without 
exceeding the average of human life, have had a 
longer personal knowledge of 5. John than he had. 


Papias lived at a time when it was still possible to 
collect and test the oral traditions of those who had 
themselves been followers of the elders; and to ‘learn 
what was said by Andrew or Peter or Philip or Thomas 
or James or John or Matthew or other disciples of the 
Lord ;’ and he himself knew two of those who had 
been personal ‘disciples of the Lord, Aristion and 
the presbyter John.’® He was a bishop of Hiera- 
polis, and knew there the daughters of Philip ;’ and 
on the other hand there is nothing improbable in 
the opinion that he was personally known to Ireneus, 
who makes frequent mention of him and had local 
associations with him. 

Of the five books which Papias wrote as an Ev- 
position or Expositions of Oracles of the Lord, we pos- 
sess only a few lines which are preserved to us in 
Eusebius, and some lately discovered fragments which 
do not materially add to our knowledge.® Of Poly- 
carp we have only part of one short letter which is 
certainly genuine.? That Papias and Polycarp both 
made use of the First Epistle of 5. John, and that the 
Epistle cannot be really separated from the Gospel, 
are among the data of the best modern criticism; and 
that Papias is made by the statements of Ireneus and 


5 Kusebius, Hist. Eccles. ili. 39. 8. Cf. Lecture VII. p. 394. 
7 Ibid. loc. cit. ° Cf. ibid. pp. 402 sqq. 


LECTURE IL. 97 


Eusebius, and still more by the ‘ silence of Eusebius,’ 
a strong direct witness to the use of the Fourth 
Gospel in the first generation of the second century, 
has obtained a high degree of probability and accep- 
tance since Bishop Lightfoot published his Lssays on 
the Work entitled Supernatural Religion.' 

The whole meaning of the history of this period 
has often been missed, because men have looked at 
the fossils of it as interesting specimens of an extinct 
life, instead of clothing them with flesh and blood, 
and seeing what that life really was. It is only the 
man who will think out the Church life and work of 
these years until the names Polycarp, and Barnabas, 
and Clement, and Ignatius, and Papias, represent to 
him actual living beings, who can understand the 
first conditions of the problem before us. 

I will not occupy your time by referring at greater 
length to proofs which are now easily accessible. I 
am more concerned to emphasize once again the 
unity of the life, and therefore of the testimony of the 
Church during these early years. Let me ask you, 
then, to consider the bearing of the following state- 
ments of Irenzus, writing towards the close of the 
century. 

Of Papias he tells us that he was 
a hearer of John, a companion of Polycarp, and a man of 
the olden time.” 


* Contemporary Review, Jan. κάρπου δὲ ἑταῖρος γεγονὼς, ἀρχαῖος 
Aug. and Oct. 1875. Republished ἀνὴρ,. .. Adv. Her. v. 33-4; 
Essays, 1889, ii. pp. v, vi. ed. Harvey, tom. ii. p. 418. 

2 Ωωάννου μὲν ἀκουστὴς, Πολυ- 


Ἡ 


Testi- 
mony of 
Irenzus 


to Papias, 


to Poly- 
carp. 


His 
Letter to 
Florinus. 


08 LECTURE II. 


Of Polycarp he says :— 


And (so it was with) Polycarp also, who not only was 
taught by Apostles, and lived in familiar intercourse 
[cuvavactpadels| with many that had seen Christ, but also 
received his appointment in Asia from Apostles, as Bishop in 
the Church of Smyrna, whom we too have seen in our youth 
[ἐν τῇ πρώτῃ ἡμῶν ἡλικίᾳ, for he survived long, and departed 
this life at a very great age, by a glorious and most notable 
martyrdom, having ever taught these very things, which he 
had learnt from the Apostles, which the Church hands down, 
and which alone are true. To these testimony is borne by all 
the Churches in Asia, and by the successors of Polycarp up to 
the present time, who was a much more trustworthy and 
safer witness of the truth than Valentinus and Marcion, and all 
such wrong-minded men. He also, when on a visit to Rome 
in the days of Anicetus, converted many tothe Church of God 
from following the afore-named heretics, by preaching that 
he had received from the Apostles this doctrine, and this only, 
which was handed down by the Church, as the truth... . 

Moreover, there is an Epistle of Polycarp addressed to 
the Philippians, which is most adequate (ἱκανωτάτη), and 
from which both his manner of life and his preaching of 
truth may be learnt by those who desire to learn and are 
anxious for their own salvation. And again, the Church in 
Kphesus, which was founded by Paul, and where John sur- 
vived till the times of Trajan, is a true witness of the tradi- 
tion of the Apostles.’ 


Or let the mind portray the scene which is thus 
described by Irenzeus in a letter to Florinus, who had 
been his fellow-pupil in boyhood, but had now in old 
age wandered from the faith :— 

These opinions, Florinus, that I may speak without 


harshness, are not of sound judgment; these opinions are not 


° Adv. Her. iii. 3, 4. Bishop Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural 
Religion, pp. 100, 101. 


LECTURE IL | 99 


in harmony with the Church, but involve those adopting them 
in the greatest impiety; these opinions even the heretics 
outside the pale of the Church have never ventured to broach ; 
these opinions the elders before us, who also were disciples of 
the Apostles, did not hand down to thee. For I saw thee, 
while I was still a boy (παῖς ὧν ἔτι), in Lower Asia in 
company with Polycarp, while thou wast faring prosperously 
in the royal court, and endeavouring to stand well with him. 
For I distinctly remember (διαμνημονεύω) the incidents of 
that time better than events of recent occurrence; for the 
lessons received in childhood (ἐκ παίδων), growing with the 
growth of the soul, become identified with it ; so that I can 
describe the very place in which the blessed Polycarp used to 
sit when he discoursed, and his goings out and his comings 
in, and his manner of life, and his personal appearance, and 
the discourses which he held before the people, and how he 
would describe his intercourse with John and with the rest 
who had seen the Lord, and how he would relate their words. 
And whatsoever things he had heard from them about the 
Lord, and about his miracles, and about his teaching, 
Polycarp, as having received them from eye-witnesses of the 
life of the Word, would relate altogether in accordance with 
the Scriptures. ΤῸ these (discourses) I used to listen at the 
time with attention by God’s mercy which was bestowed upon 
me, noting them down, not on paper, but in my heart; and by 
the grace of God I constantly ruminate upon them faithfully 
(yunoiws). And I can testify in the sight of God, that if 
the blessed and Apostolic elder had heard anything of this 
kind, he would have cried out, and stopped his ears, and said 
after his wont, ‘O good God, for what times hast Thou kept 
me, that I should endure such things ?’ and would even have 
fled from the place where he was sitting or standing when he 
heard such words. And indeed, this can be shown from his 
letters which he wrote either to the neighbouring Churches 
for their confirmation, or to certain of the brethren for their 
warning and exhortation.‘ 


* Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. v.20. Bishop Lightfoot, wt swpra, pp. 96, 97. 


H 2 


Papias 
and 


Basilides, 
fi. 125. 


109 LECTURE IL. 


In the few lines which Eusebius has preserved 
from the lost work of Papias, we learn that the 
writer 


did not delight in those who have very much to say, but in 
those who teach the truth ; ° 


and there is great probability in the suggestion that 
he refers to the ‘very much’ which was said by 
Basilides, who, according to the account of his op- 
ponent Agrippa Castor, as given in Eusebius, wrote 
twenty-four books upon the Gospels.° These are 
doubtless to be identified with the Hwegetica, from the 
twenty-third of which there is an extract in Clement 
of Alexandria.‘ The date of Basilides is admittedly 
not later than the reion of Hadrian, a.p. 117-138. 
The Groningen Professor Hofstede de Groot puts his 
life at a.D. 65-135, and his florwit in the reign of 
Trajan, A.D. 97-117 ;* but this work, though not 
without acute observations, leaves too much of the 
impression of an advocate to carry full conviction. 
We shall probably not be erring on the side of too 
early a date, if we put it, with De Groot’s Leyden 
opponent, Dr. Scholten,’ at a.p. 125. The important 
question is whether EHippolytus, when he treats of the 
system of Basilides, in which he admittedly makes 
clear quotation from $. John, is dealing at first hand 


5 Hist. Eccles. iii. 39. melhrte Ausgabe, 1868, pp. 4-8. 

© Ibid. iv. 7. ° “Er lebte zur Zeit Hadri- 

* Strom. iv. §§ 89 sqq.; ed. ans, um 125 zu Alexandrien.’ 
Klotz, tom. ii. p. 322. Scholten-Manchot, Die  diltesten 


ὁ Basilides u.s.w., Deutsche ver- | Zeugnisse, 1867, p. 64. 


LECTURE. Ἢ TOL 


with the founder of the system or with a later dis- 
ciple.’ 

I shall not, at the close of a lecture, enter upon 
this difficult and delicate question of. criticism. I 
shall for the present assume, without forgetting that 
it will be my duty to justify the assumption here- 
after, that there is, at least, a distinct inclination of 
the balance of probability in favour of the opinion 
that Hippolytus is dealing with Basilides personally. 
If I anticipate a later discussion only to add that this 
view is strongly expressed by such critics as Mr. 
Matthew Arnold and M. Renan, it will show, mean- 
while, that it is supported by thinkers of an inde- 
pendent position. We shall find that Mr. Arnold 
further believed that Gnosticism in its primitive forms 
is to be traced to a time earlier than the second cen- 
tury, and that the existence of Gnostic elements in 
any writing is far from being proof ef a second-cen- 
tury date ; a conclusion which is borne out by the 
most recent discussions on the subject.” 

Nor can I now do more than refer to results—the 
evidence for which I shall endeavour to present in a 
later lecture “—which have followed from recent in- 
vestigations of the position of Ignatius and other 
Apostolic Fathers. ‘Some among us may not be pre- 
pared to admit the earliest dates now claimed for the 
Ignatian Epistles, but few will refuse to admit the 


1 Hippolytus, Refutatio Omm- pp. 346, 356-378, 514 sq. 
um Heresium, vii. 2. 20-27, x. 2 Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 371 sqq. 
14; ed. Duncker et Schneidewin, — °* Cf. abid. pp. 395 sqq. 


Other 
points 


referred to 
a succeed- 
ing lec- 
ture. 


Result of 
the evi- 
dence of 
thesecond 
century: 


102 LECTURE Π. 


genuineness of the Vossian recension, or will fail to 
see that if these seven letters are by Ignatius, they 
connect the Fourth Gospel immediately with the age 
of S. John. To these points we shall recur. 


Now, however, our study of the evidence of the 
second century, brief and cursory as it has necessarily 
been, must come to a close. What deductions are 
we justified in drawing from it ? 

What from the acceptance of the Third Generation 
of the century, represented by Irenzeus, Clement, 
Tertullian, Theophilus, Melito, Apolinaris, Poly- 
crates, the Gnostics ? 

What from the acceptance of the Second Genera- 
ation, represented by Justin the Martyr, Tatian, the 
Clementines, Valentinus, Marcion ? 

What from the acceptance of the First Generation, 
represented by Papias, Basilides, Polycarp, Ignatius ? 

What from the acceptance alike by Catholics and 
heretics ? 

What from the acceptance alike in every part of 
Christendom ? 

What especially from the acceptance in Asia 
Minor, the scene of the Apostle’s labours, in the 
generation which witnessed and immediately suc- 
ceeded the Apostle’s life ? 

What from the acceptance of the century taken as 
a whole, for human life may be classed in generations 
with sharply-marked divisions, but is lived in the unity 
of a web whose threads intertwine at every point ? 


LECTURE IL. 103 


What from the probability which arises from the 
mere co-existence of these separate witnesses, and is 
entirely independent of the witnesses themselves ? + 

What from the union of these distinct arguments, 
which interpenetrate and support each other ? 

The force of evidence will, of course, vary, as it 
is presented to different minds ; but I confess that 
the fuller examination, which I have been able to 
submit to you only in outline, seems to my own mind 
to leave no possibility of doubt. I invite you to the 
a of an outline, always imperfect, and in 
present circumstances of time and person specially 
so, but—of the evidence itself ; and to the earnest and 
candid student of that evidence it will, I am confident, 
appear, that it is as certain that the Fourth Gospel 
was believed throughout every decade of the second 


The 
Fourth 
Gospel 
accepted 
as work of 
Apostle 
John. 


century to be the work of the Apostle John, as any | 


fact of the second century can to us be certain. 


We have found, chiefly by aid of pioneers who have 
gone before, tracks here and there in the unknown 
forest of second-century history. Wherever we can 
follow them we meet the stream which we are seeking 
to trace. We are now near the source. The stream 
which enters the century here must be—yes, it is— 
one with the river which passes from it yonder. 


In the next lecture we shall meet it again in the 
flow of sixteen centuries of history. 


4 See opinion of Principal Campbell, ut supra, p. 52. 


othe! 


“iy 
athe 


“oss 
κί, ἰδὲ 


a ΝΥ ΤΟΣ 
w we \ ᾿ Ἵ 
ἡ ὮΝ! ἥν vba banlhag ita 


ie } Minin pia Rs As) 
ee 


HE) Eke ee 


THE ‘JUDGMENT OF CENTURIES’ 


END OF SECOND TO END OF HIGHTHEENTH CENTURY 


**"OLD THINGS NEED NOT BE THEREFORE TRUE,” 
O BROTHER MEN, NOR YET THE NEW; 
AH! STILL AWHILE THE OLD THOUGHT RETAIN, 
AND YET CONSIDER IT AGAIN! 


THE SOULS OF NOW TWO THOUSAND YEARS 
HAVE LAID UP HERE THEIR TOILS AND FEARS, 
AND ALL THE EARNINGS OF THEIR PAIN,— 

AH, YET CONSIDER IT AGAIN! 


WE! WHAT DO WE SEE? EACH A SPACE 

OF SOME FEW YARDS BEFORE HIS FACE; 

DOES THAT THE WHOLE WIDE PLAN EXPLAIN ? 
AH, YET CONSIDER IT AGAIN! | 


ALAS! THE GREAT WORLD GOES ITS WAY, 
AND TAKES ITS TRUTH FROM EACH NEW DAY; 
THEY DO NOT QUIT, NOR CAN RETAIN, 

FAR LESS CONSIDER IT AGAIN.’ 


Clough. 


LECTURE III. 


And ... many ... beliewed ... because of the word of the 
woman, who testified, ... And many more believed because of his word ; 
and they said to the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy 
speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed 
the Saviowr of the world.—John iv. 39, 41, 42. 


WHEN we pass from the second to the third and the 
succeeding centuries, we pass in the critical history 
of the New Testament from the glimmering light of 
dawn to the full and clear light of day. Evidence 
of the existence and use of the Fourth Gospel 
now appears on every hand, and the validity of this 
evidence is admitted by all competent judges. There 
is a point at which the unconscious colouring of a 
preconceived theory can no longer alter the com- 
plexion of facts; and this point we have reached. 
Our task to-day, therefore, is not to adduce the evi- 
dence in detail—that would be impossible; but to 
estimate it as a whole, and to examine the principles 
on which it is founded. Even this would be impos- 
sible if we were to attempt more than a bird’s-eye 
view ; but more is not needed for our purpose. 


On the threshold of the third century there meets 
us much which cannot in any case be placed later, 


Facts of 
the recep- 
tion. 
Evidence 
of sixteen 
centuries : 


Third cen- 
tury : 


The Mura- 
torian 
Frag- 
ment. 


The 
Versions. 


“TY 


Eastern 
church: 
Origen, 
186-253. 


108 . LECTURE IIL 


and ought, in the opinion of many men of best 
trained critical judgment, to have been placed earlier. 
Now at latest, the fragment of the list discovered by 
Muratori and known by his name, not only testifies to 
the acknowledged use of the Fourth Gospel in the 
churches of Italy, but also supplies the first account 
of its origin. 

Now, if not long before, come the Versions. How 
far back do the churches which demanded transla- 
tions carry the existence of the original! How highly 
prized was that which each church, no longer content 
with the voice of the preacher, or the interpretation 
of the reader, took such pains to acquire! How widely 
spread, and therefore how deeply rooted, is the tree 
which already has branches in the Greek of Ephesus 
and Athens and Rome, the Latin of Carthage, the 
Coptic of Egypt, the Syriac of the East! Our 
knowledge of the history reminds us that every 
writing of the New Testament was not included in 
all these Versions—not the Apocalypse, for example, 
which some of our modern critics take to be the best 
attested book of the New Testament, and an argu- 
ment from which to prove that the Fourth Gospel 
cannot be by 8. John—but that the now disputed 
Fourth Gospel was then nowhere questioned. 

Here is the evidence of Origen, in criticism the 
sreatest of the Fathers, whose manhood extends over 
nearly the first half of the century. Scattered 
through his voluminous writings are frequent refer- 
ences to questions of the Canon, many of which 


LECTURE III. 109 


are collected by Eusebius.‘ He does not clearly 
mark out his divisions, but in effect he foreshadows 
the more distinct analysis of Eusebius and makes 
three classes of writings—the genuine, the mixed, the 
spurious. The Jast class includes no writing in our 
present Bibles ; the second class includes the Epistle 
of S. James, 5. Jude, the Second Epistle of S. Peter, 
the Second and Third Epistles of 8S. John; the 
first class includes the remainder, that is, nearly the 
whole of our present New Testament. On the 
Gospel of 5. John he wrote commentaries, the 
earliest portion of which belongs to his Alexandrian 
life, that is, to a date before a.p. 231, as we may infer 
from his own statement.” He considers the Gospels 
to be the ‘ first-fruits’ of Scripture, and the Gospel 
according to 5. John to be the ‘first-fruits’ of the 
Gospels.* He knows that there are ‘four Gospels 
alone uncontroverted in the Church of God under 
heaven,’ and of the writer of the Fourth Gospel he 
asks :— 
Why is it necessary for me to speak about him who reclined 
upon the breast of Jesus, John, who has left behind a single 
Gospel, though he confesses that he could write so many as 
not even the world could contain ? 4 

Immediately after Origen, and in part represent- 
ing him, comes his most eminent pupil Dionysius, 


1 Hist. Eccles. vi. 25. 6 ; ed. ut supra, tom. ii. pp. 5, 6. 
; ᾽ Ppp. 9, 
? Origen, Commentaria wm * Euseb. Hist. Hecles. vi. 25. 


Toannem, tom. vi. ὃ 1 ; ed. Huet., Cf. Reuss, Geschichte der heiligen 

1668, tom. 11. p. 94. Cf. Euseb. Schriften, ὃ 311; Davidson, 

Hist. Eccles. vi. 24. Canon, p. 115; and Westcott, 
* Commentaria, ut supra,tom.i. Canon, ed. 6, pp. 358 sq. 


His divi- 
sion of 
the sacred 
writings. 


Dionysius 
of Alex- 
andria, 

Οὐ 95-265. 


The 
Fourth 
Gospel 
and the 
Apoca- 
lypse. 


110 LECTURE III. 


president of the catechetical school and bishop of 
Alexandria. Eusebius has preserved a portion of his 
work On Promises, which contains the first example 
of a considerable argument on one of the sacred 
Scriptures based upon internal evidence. It is per- 
haps also an example of the unconscious bias of 
party. Nepos, bishop of Arsinoé in Egypt, had 
published a work against the allegorical school of 
Alexandria, as Eusebius also tells us,° and had sought 
to establish the literal chiliastic interpretation of the 
Apocalypse. Dionysius was strongly opposed to 
this view, and in support of his arguments tries 
to show that the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse 
could not, on account of differences in the character, 
language, and construction of the two writings, be 
by the same author. The writer of the Apocalypse 
may have been, he thinks, a man named John. 
He fully allows that he was a holy and inspired man, 
but he could hardly concur in the opinion that he 
was John the Apostle, the son of Zebedee, the 
brother of James, who wrote the Gospel and the 
Catholic Epistle. Dionysius is then the forerunner 
of much later criticism which has distinguished 
between these writings; but his distinction leads to 
results exactly the opposite of those of some critics 
with whom we shall have to deal. For him the 
Gospel is quite certainly the work of the Apostle, 
and therefore the Apocalypse is by another, though 
an inspired hand. For them the Apocalypse is quite 


5 "EXeyxos ᾿Αλληγοριστῶν, Hist. Eccles. vii. 24. ® Ibid. vii. 25. 


LECTURE II. pet 


certainly by the Apostle John, and the Gospel is 
therefore by another, and not an inspired hand. 

To the third century and the Eastern Church, 
probably to the diocese of Ephesus, belongs also the 
first part of the ecclesiastical code which is known 
as the Apostolical Constitutions. It contains the fol- 
lowing official reference to the Gospels :— 

Afterwards let a deacon or a priest read the Gospels which 


I, Matthew and John, have handed down to you, and which 
Luke and Mark, the helpers of Paul, have left to you.’ 


In the Western Church we find the same con- 
_sensus of statement. To Caius and Hippolytus of 
Rome, whose period overlaps the close of the second 
and the opening of the third century, it will be 
necessary to refer later, but we may at once note that 
their testimony to the Fourth Gospel is beyond ques- 
tion. Hippolytus indeed wrote a Defence or Hxposi- 
tion of the Gospel and the Apocalypse ;* and Caius, 
as we shall see, clearly admits the authenticity of the 
Gospel. 

Of the African writers of the third century, 
Cyprian is in every way the chief, and may be 
taken as the representative. For him there is no 
doubt as to the four Gospels, which are symbolized 
by the four rivers of paradise.’ A more formal list of 


7 Constitutiones Apostolorum, ture VII. pp. 392 sq. 


ii. 57, ed. Cotelier, Patres Apo- ® ‘Has arbores rigat quatuor 
stolici, tom. 1. p. 262. fluminibus, id est, evangeliis 
8 “γχὲρ τοῦ κατὰ ᾿Ιωάννην evay- quatuor, quibus baptismi gratiam 


γελίου καὶ ἀποκαλύψεως. Cf. Lec-  salutaris czlesti inundatione lar- 


The Apo- 
stolical 
Constitu- 
tions. 


Western 
Church : 


Cyprian, 
fl. 
246-258, 


Fourth 
and suc- 
ceeding 


centuries : 


East: 
Eusebius, 
Ὁ. 260— 
999. 


Copies 

prepared 
for Con- 
stantine. 


112 LECTURE III. 
the books which were generally read in the African 
church of the third century is furnished in the Codex 
Claromontanus ;+ and here the four Gospels stand, as 
a matter of course, at the head of the stichometrical 
list, and $. John according to Western usage takes 
the second place. 


The fourth century is marked out in the history 
of the New Testament Scriptures by the investiga- 
tions of Eusebius; and whatever opinion may be 
formed of some of this writer’s statements, there can 
be no doubt that, in reference to our present subject, 
he had access in both the East and the West to full 
information as to the usage of the churches and the 
opinions of individuals; and that we have in him, for 
the first time, a careful examination of evidence on a 
distinctly historical principle. His division of the 
books of the New Testament, founded in part on that 
of Origen, is familiar to the beginner in the study of 
ecclesiastical history ; and I need hardly pause to 
note that among the books which he regards as un- 
doubted and generally acknowledged, come first of all 
the holy quaternion of the Gospels, and among them 
the Gospel according to 8. John.’ 

Eusebius must have exercised in another way an 
important influence on the Canon of the Greek church. 
About the year A.D. 532, the emperor Constantine 


gitur.? Cyprian, Lpistole 73. Neutestamentlichen Kanon, pp. 

Opp. ed. Benedict. Venet. 1758, 175 sq. 

p. 317. * Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. iii. 3, 
1 Cf. Credner, Geschichte des 25, 31, 39; vi. 14. 


LECTURE III. 113 


directed him to have fifty copies of ἃ collection 
of the Scriptures specially prepared for public use. 
They were to be written by caligraphists who knew 
their work, in a readable hand, and upon parchment. 
Everything necessary for this important task, inclu- 
ding two public carriages, was placed at the bishop’s 
command, and the commission was duly executed. 
The choice of the contents was left to Eusebius as 
best acquainted with the use of the Church. He 
does not formally tell us how he fulfilled this difficult 
and important trust, but his own writings give us 
safe guidance, and we shall not be wrong if we follow 
Credner* in supposing that the collections thus pro- 
vided included all our present books of the New 
Testament, with the exception of the Apocalypse 
which was not then generally received in the Greek 
church. They would quite certainly have included 
the Fourth Gospel. 

Cyril of Jerusalem devotes part of his Catechesis 
to an examination of the books of Holy Scripture. 
He advises that the works which are generally 
acknowledged should alone be read ; and that works 
which are not read in churches should also be omitted 
in private reading. He places in the first rank the 
four Gospels, the Acts, the seven Catholic Epistles ;° 


3 Eusebius, Vita Constantini, 
iv. 36, 37; ed. Migne, tom. viii. 
p. 80. 

* Credner, ut supra, pp. 205- 
218. 

° Τῆς δὲ καινῆς διαθήκης, τὰ τέσ- 
σαρα μόνα εὐαγγέλια : τὰ δὲ λοιπὰ 


ψευδεπίγραφα καὶ βλαβερὰ τυγχάνει. 


“ “ a 
Ἔνγραψαν καὶ Μανιχαῖοι κατὰ Θωμᾶν 


εὐαγγέλιον, ὅπερ εὐωδίᾳ(αϊ. ὅπερ, 
ὥσπερ εὐωδίᾳ) τῆς εὐαγγελικῆς 
ἐπωνυμίας ἐπικεχρωσμένον 
(al. προσωνυμίας) διαφθείρει τὰς 
ψυχὰς τῶν ἀπλουστέρων. Δέχου δὲ 


i 


Cyril of 
Jeru- 
salem, 

c. 315-386. 


Athana- 
sius, 
c. 296-373. 


Identity 
of his 
Canon 


114 LECTURE III. 


and when he has later to speak of the Antichrist, he 
takes occasion to imply that he specially excludes the 
Apocalypse from his authorities. It is not that he 
denies its authenticity, but that he does not receive 
it as a divinely inspired and Canonical work. 
Athanasius was a contemporary of both Eusebius 
and Cyril, and represents Alexandria and Kgypt, 
as they represent Constantinople and Palestine. He 
took the opportunity of an annual pastoral letter, 
which the patriarchs of Egypt were in the habit of 
addressing to their flocks, to enter upon the question 
of the Canon. He does so with some hesitation, and 
offers an apology for venturing to deal with the sub- 
ject, justifying himself by the example of 5. Luke’s 
preface. His method of treatment is not that of the 
critic entering upon an investigation for the benefit 
of scholars ; but that of a bishop giving directions to 
the clergy and others of his own diocese, upon a 
matter which was still under discussion and upon 
which they naturally looked to him for guidance. 
‘In these books alone,’ he asserts, ‘is the doctrine of 
religion proclaimed. Let no one add to them. Let 
no one take anything from them.’ The list of the 
writings of the New Testament which is thus made 
out is remarkable, in that it includes, for the first 


\ A ’ cal , > , A , > , , 
καὶ Tas πράξεις τῶν δώδεκα ἀπουστό- λοιπὰ πάντα, ἐν δευτέρῳ κείσθω 
λων. Πρὸς τούτοις δὲ καὶ ras ἕπτὰ (αἰ. ἔξω κείσθω ἐν δευτέρῳ). 
᾿Ιακώβου, καὶ Πέτρου, καὶ ᾿Ιωάννου Καὶ ὅσα [μὲν] ἐν ἐκκλησίαις μὴ 
’ὔ > / ’ ~ 

καὶ ᾿Ιούδα καθολικὰς ἐπιστολάς - ἀναγινώσκεται, ταῦτα μηδὲ κατὰ 
ἐπισφράγισμα δὲ τῶν πάντων, καὶ σαυτὸν ἀναγίνωσκε, καθὼς ἤκουσας. 
μαθητῶν τὸ τελευταῖον, Tas Παύλου Catechesis, iv. 36, ed. Reischl, 
δεκατέσσαρας ἐπιστολάς. Ta δὲ i. 128, 130. 


LECTURE III. 115 


time in an Eastern catalogue, the Apocalypse, in 
opposition to both Eusebius and Cyril; and that it 
excludes all that is not contained in our present New 
Testament. The Canon which Athanasius drew up 
for his own people in the thirty-ninth year of his 
episcopate, that is, in the year A.D. 365, is identical 
with that which we commonly accept to-day.° 

This direction of the bishop would meet with 
ready acquiescence throughout the diocese; but it 
did not of course affect other dioceses, nor did it 
necessarily command the allegiance of all scholars 
in Alexandria itself. On a question which was 
still open, and which was one of literary criticism, 
the director of the catechetical school might think 
himself as much entitled to express an opinion as 
a bishop and a patriarch. We accordingly find 
Didymus, who lived in Alexandria at the same time 
as Athanasius, publishing an exegetical work on the 
Catholic Epistles, which is now extant in Latin only, 
and teaching that the Second Epistle of S. Peter is 
not Canonical. The work is one for use in public 
service, its authenticity is not questioned, but it is not, 
in the opinion of Didymus, of Canonical authority.’ 

Gregory of Nazianzus is another famous con- 
temporary of Athanasius who dealt with the books of 


8 ἐκ τῆς λθ΄, ἑορταστικῆς ἐπιστο-  satam, quee licet publicetur, non 
λῆς. Opp. ed. Bened. 1777, tom. tamen in canone est.’ Didymus 
i. p. 765. Cf. the Syriac in Festal Alexandr. ed. Migne, p. 1774. 
Epistles, Oxf. 1854, p. 139. Cf. Liicke, Quest. Didymian. i. 

7*Non igitur ignorandum, 13; Credner, ut supra, p. 230. 
presentem Epistolam esse fal- 


rg 


with our 
own. 


Didymus 
of Alex- 
andria, 

c. 309-395. 


Gregory 
of 


Nazi- 
anzus, 


c. 325-390. 


Amphi- 
lochius, 


374-394. 


116 LECTURE III. 


the sacred Scriptures. Following the natural bent 
of his own poetic fancy, and following perhaps 
examples which go back as far as the Muratorian 
Fragment,*® he composed his list of the Old and New 
Testament in verse. ‘ Matthew,’ in Gregory’s view, 
‘described the wonders of Christ for the Hebrews ; 
Mark, for Italy ; Luke, for Achaia ; John, the great 
The 


list does not include the Apocalypse; and the con- 


herald who had crossed the heavens, for all.’ ° 


cluding lines prove that it is definitely excluded from 
the undoubted writings.’ At the same time Gregory 
quotes it,? and the description of the author of the 
Fourth Gospel which I have just read is taken from it. 

Included in the same volume with the works of 
Gregory has been commonly printed the catalogue 
of his friend Amphilochius, archbishop of Iconium in 
Lycaonia. He is aware of the doubts which some 
have as to the Hebrews, but dismisses them in a 
word. Whether three or seven Catholic Epistles are 
to be received he is less certain. ‘The Apocalypse,’ 
he tells us, ‘some would include, but it is excluded 


by most writers.’ The Fourth Gospel is, though 


® Cf. Lecture I. p. 45. 
® Ματθαῖος μὲν ἔγραψεν Ἑβραίοις 
θαύματα Χριστοῦ" 
Μάρκος δ᾽ ᾿Ιταλίῃ, Λουκᾶς ᾿Αχαΐ- 
ad" 
Πᾶσι δ᾽ ᾿Ιωάννης, κήρυξ μέγας, 
οὐρανοφοίτης. 
Gregory Nazianz. Carmina xii. ; 
ed. Benedict. tom. ii. p. 260. 
1 Ἰούδα δ᾽ ἐστὶν ἑβδόμη. Πάσας 
ἔχεις. 


Ei τι δὲ τούτων ἐκτὸς, οὐκ ἐν 
γνησίαις. Ibid. 
2 Oratio xvii. Opp., ut supra, i. 
p. 536. 
3 Τὴν δὲ ᾿Αποκάλυψιν τὴν ᾿Ιωάννου 
πάλιν 
Τινὲς μὲν ἐγκρίνουσιν, οἱ πλείους 
δέ γε 
Νόθην (νόθον) λέγουσιν. 
Amphilochius, Iambi ad Selew- 
cum. Opera, ed. Cambefis, p. 134 ; 


LECTURE III. 117 


fourth in order, first in doctrinal importance, for 
this son of thunder gives forth in mighty sound the 
word of God.’* In the concluding lines Amphi- 
lochius speaks of this Canon of the inspired Scrip- 
tures as the ‘ probably most unfalsified ;’° by which 
he seems to indicate on the one hand that no definitely 
fixed rule had yet obtained official recognition in 
the churches of Asia Minor, and, on the other hand, 
that more or less imperfect or intentionally altered 
lists were not unknown. 

Epiphanius, bishop of Constantia or Salamis, is 
known to us chiefly as the historian of heresies, 
which he marks with a keen and ever-watchful eye. 
While dealing with the Aétians,° he introduces 
parenthetically a list of the Scriptures, which is in 
the New Testament almost identical with that of 
Athanasius. But Wisdom and Sirach are also called 
divine Scriptures,’ and the Apostolical Constitutions are 
a ‘divine word and doctrine,’ ὃ though both are de- 
scribed elsewhere as ‘ doubtful.’ ° 


The Greek church and school of Antioch is 
represented by Theodore bishop of Mopsuestia, who 
Gallandi, Bibliotheca vi. p. 495. Opera, ed. Benedict., 1840, 

4 προσθεὶς, ἀρίθμει τὸν ᾿Ιωάννην p. 1104. 
χρόνῳ 6 Heres. \xxvi.; ed. Oehler, 

Τέταρτον, ἀλλὰ πρῶτον ὕψει Corpus, tom. ii. pt. ili. p. 240. 

δογμάτων" 7 Cf. e.g. Heres. lxiv. ; op. cit. 

Βροντῆς yap υἱὸν τοῦτον εἰκότως tom. ii. pt. 11. p. 316; and xxxiii. 

καλῶ, op. cit. tom. 11. pt. 1. p. 412. 

Μέγιστον ἠχήσαντα τῷ Θεοῦ 9. Heres, Ιχχχ Oh ο Ὁ 

Χ Ibid. 414. 
᾿ Οὗτος ἀψευδέστατος 9. Heres. viil. ; op. cit. tom. ii. 


Κανὼν ἂν εἴη τῶν θεοπνεύστων pt. i. p. 58. Heres. ἸΙχχ. ; op. cit. 
γραφῶν. tom. li. pt. 111. p. 26. 


Epipha- 
nius, 
c. 320-403. 


Theodore 
of 


~Mop- 
suestia, 
c. 350-428. 


118 LECTURE III. 


was known as the Hzegete. He is said by his op- 
ponent Leontius of Byzantium, who wrote towards 
the close of the seventh century, to have interpreted 
the Scriptures in a poor and spiritless fashion ; by 
which is meant probably that, after the manner of the 
Antiochene school, he did not follow the exuberant 
interpretation of the allegorists; and he is further 
said to have subtracted from the divinely prescribed 
number of books. He rejected, Leontius tells us, 
Job, the Chronicles, the Song of Solomon, the titles 
of the Psalms, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, the 
Epistle of 5. James, the Second Epistle of S. Peter, 
the Second and Third Epistles of S. John, ὃ. Jude, 
and the Apocalypse.’ This is, however, to be taken 
as the statement of an opponent, writing after a long 
interval and from a very different point of view. 
But Theodore, free as he was in his treatment of 
the Canon, wrote a commentary on the Fourth 
Gospel which is largely preserved in the Catena of 
Corderius,” as are some important passages of the 
twentieth chapter in the acts of the fifth council.’ 
It is said to exist entire in a Chaldee MS. version 
in the Monastery of ὃ. George on the Tigris, near 


Catena Patrum 


' Leontius Byzantinus contra 
Nestorianos et Eutychianos, lib. 
ill. ; Gallandi, Bibliotheca, xii. p. 
687. Cf. Credner, Kanon u.s.w. 
p. 229, and Hinleitung, ὃ 239, p. 
649 ; Fritzsche, De Theodori Mop- 
suestent Vita et Scriptis, 1836, p. 
88 ; and especially Kihn, Theodor 
von Mopsuestia und Junilius Afri- 
canus, 1880, ὃ 54sqq., esp. ὃ 56. 


* Corderius, 
Grecorum in sanctum Joannem, 
1630. See especially the extract 
from Theodore in the Proemium ; 
and Fritzsche, Theodori in Novum 
Testamentwm Comm., Turici, 1847, 
pp. 19-42. 

5. Labbé-Mansi:  Oonciliorwm 
Collectio, ed. 1763, tom. ix. pp. 
207-209. 


LECTURE IIL 119 


Maussul ; * but in any case it establishes beyond doubt 
the fact that Theodore regarded the Fourth Gospel 
as an inspired book which was written by S. John. 
A better known and in many ways greater repre- 
sentative of the Antiochene school, but not greater 
as an exegete and a critic, was John of the 
Golden Mouth, afterwards patriarch of Constanti- 
nople. In the wide range of his works there is no 
reference to the Apocalypse or to the four shorter 
Catholic Epistles.’ Of the Fourth Gospel it need not 
be said there is constant use. The synopsis of the 
Old and New Testaments which is printed with the 
works of Chrysostom ° excludes the Apocalypse, and 
expressly speaks of the three Catholic Epistles. An 
anonymous homily belonging to the same age and 
locality, printed also with Chrysostom’s works, speaks 
of the second and third Epistles of δ. John as rejected 


4 <. . . Alter est fama inclytus 
Theodorus Mopsuestenus a Nes- 
torianis Doctor cecumenicus, et 
Commentator per antonomasiam 
dictus et habitus, in suo Eruditis 
desideratissimo Commentario in 
Joannem, cujus exemplar in 
codice unico Chaldaico, anno 
superiori a@ me, maximo cum 
gaudio, in Coenobio 8. Georgii 
ad Tigrim, prope Maussul reper- 
tum, nescio an uspiam alibi 
habeat exemplum.’ Khayyath, 
Syri Orientales, p. 76, note. 
Cf. Professor Swete’s article in 
Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of 
Christian Biography, iv. p. 940. 

> *Eit vere sanctus hic doctor, 


qui Scripturze sacrz libros omnes 
in Homiliis suis adhibet, quatuor 
illarum Epistolarum loca nusquam 
affert ; aut saltem hujusmodi loca 
in ejus scriptis nondum depre- 
hendi: etiamsi vero deprehende- 
rentur, non tamen inde sequeretur 
eam Scripture partem canonicam 
haberi : nam illis temporibus non 
pauca erant in quibusdam Kc- 
clesiis, que legebantur quidem, 
sed canonica esse non reputa- 
bantur : ἀναγινωσκόμενα μὲν, μὴ Ka- 
νονιζόμενα δέ.᾽ Montfaucon, Chry- 
sostomi Opera, Paris, 1834, vi. p. 
635. 

δ᾽ Synopsis Veteris et Novi Tes- 
tamentt. Op. cit. vi. pp. 372-3. 


John 
Chryso- 
stom, 

c. 347-407. 


Period of 
Uncial 
MSS. 


120 LECTURE IIL. 


from the Canon by the Fathers, whereas the first 
Epistle all with one accord declared to be by S. John.’ 

It will be clear to the reader of Chrysostom that 
for him the sacred Scriptures are books—Aiblia— 
in a special sense; and it is probable that the later 
meaning of the word Bible arose from his frequent 
use of the term. ‘ Obtain books,’ he cries in an often- 
quoted sermon—‘ obtain a Bible—that medicine of 
the soul; and if you care for no other, get at least 
the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, the 
Gospels, your perpetual teachers.’ ὃ 

The result of this inquiry into the Canon of the 
Greek church in Syria in the beginning of the fifth 
century is that we find it to be identical with that 
which existed in the Peshito, the received Version of 
the Syrian church, more than two centuries before. 


The third and fourth centuries are the golden 
age of Greek theology and criticism. We need not 
follow them into the ages of silver and lead; we 
need not pass to the extremer limits of the East ; 
nor yet examine the period of the great Uncial 
manuscripts—actually existing witnesses which go 
back in material and form to the fourth, fifth, and 
sixth centuries, tracing their text from the second 
century onwards, and finding their local history alike in 
Eastern and Western Christendom. It is nothing to 
our purpose to examine the lists of Anastatius Sinaita, 

7 Opera, ut supra, vi. p. 503. reading τῶν ἀποστόλων τὰς Πρά- 


δ᾽ Homil. IX. in Coloss. Op. cit. ἕεις, τὰ Ἐὐαγγέλια, διδασκάλους διη- 
xi. p. 451. I follow Montfaucon’s νεκεῖς. 


LECTURE III. 191] 


of the Apostolic Canons, of Cosmas Indicopleustes, 
of John Damascene, of the Stichometry of Nicephorus, 
of Photius of Constantinople, of the pseudo-Athan- 
asian synopsis, of Zonaras, of Alexius Aristenus, of 
Theodorus Balsamon of Antioch, of the monks 
Arsenius and Matthew, of Nicephorus Callistus, of 
Metrophanes Critopulus patriarch of Alexandria, of 
Cyril Lukar patriarch of Constantinople. Itis nothing 
to our purpose to discuss the Canons of the earlier 
council of Laodicea in the fourth century ; or those 
of the Trullan council of Constantinople, which de- 
voted special labours to the settlement of the lists of 
the sacred books ; nor need we pause at the second 
Nicene council of the eighth century ; nor at the last 
council of the, Greek church, which assembled in 


Further 
survey not 
necessary. 


Close of 
Canon in 
the East. 


January of 1672 ‘at Constantinople, and in March at | 


Jerusalem, and finally undoing the work for which 
Cyril and Metrophanes had striven, followed the 
Roman decrees of Trent and canonized the Apocrypha. 
It is nothing to our purpose to trace the growth of 
the Syrian Canon in succeeding Versions ; or the list 
which the African bishop, Junilius, framed from 
knowledge which he derived from the Persian school 
of Nisibis ; or that which Bar-Hebreeus formed from 
the use at Antioch; or that of the Ethiopian, or 
Armenian, or Russian churches. These include 
points which are of greater or less—some of them of 
very great—interest for the history of the Canon and 
of the disputed books ; but throughout them all no 
word of discussion or doubt is ever raised as to the 


No doubt 
as to the 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Border- 
land: 


Hilary, 

t 368. 
Philaster, 
ΤῸ: 387. 


Rufinus, 
c.345-410. 


In the 
West : 


Jerome, 
c. 346.- 
420. 


123 LECTURE III. 


Fourth Gospel. Ifit is singled out from the others, 
it is to occupy a place of honour, and to be made 
the chief, or ranked among the chief, of the sacred 
writings which God has given to the Church. 

If we turn again from the history of the East to 
that of the West, we find similar results. 

Three names are prominent as links between these 
separate halves of Christendom :— 

Hilary of Poitiers, whose Canon is almost iden- 
tical with that of Origen; Philaster of Brescia, 
chiefly known as the historian of heresies, who has 
for us this special interest that he speaks® of the 
heresy of those who rejected the Gospel and Apo- 
calypse of S. John, a heresy the knowledge of which 
he almost certainly borrowed from Hippolytus, as 
we shall have occasion to see; Rufinus of Aquileia, 
who follows Athanasius as closely as Hilary follows 
Origen. But while the border-land was thus occu- 
pied, the general distinction that the Greek church 
did not accept the Apocalypse, and that the Latin 
church did not accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
still remained. : 

The two great Fathers of the Western church in 
the fourth century, Jerome’ and Augustine,? both 
wrote commentaries on the Fourth Gospel, which 
was to each of them, without shadow of doubt, an 


9. Heres. lx.; Oehler, Corpus, unico volumine comprehensum, 


i. p. 60. qui periit.? Lampe, Commen- 
‘ *Hieronymus Stridonensis,  tarius, tom. i. p. 251. 
florens a.c. 378, im Hvangelia 2 InJoannis Evangelium. Trac- 


quatuor Commentarium dedit,  tatws cxxiv. ; ed. Migne, tom. ili. 


LECTURE III. ! 123 


inspired and sacred Scripture coming from the Apostle 
John. Their works in relation to the Canon are full 
of interest, though we may not here dwell on them. 
They found their completion in the synod of Hippo 
in A.D. 393, the more decisive synod of Carthage in 
A.D. 397, the decree of Innocent the First, the renewed 
synod of Carthage in a.p. 419. For the West, the 
question of the Canon was settled at the beginning 
of the fifth, to be opened again only at the beginning 
of the sixteenth century. 

There is one seeming exception to this universal 
testimony which cannot be passed over, inasmuch 
as attention has been recently directed to it. The 
so-called Alogi are a shadowy people whose sub- 
stantial existence is doubtful, and whose position 
in time and place, assuming that they did exist, 
is necessarily more doubtful still. But during the 
last few months they have again been brought into 
prominence by references made to them in Dr. 
Zahn’s new History of the Canon*® in which, follow- 
ing an earlier article of Dr. Harnack’s,* he assumes 
that they were referred to by lIreneus. Zahn’s 
treatment of the subject does not escape Harnack’s 
trenchant criticism : nor are either Zahn or Har- 


nack allowed to pass unheeded by Dr. Hilgenfeld, 
pp. 1879 sqq. Cf. ‘Ioannesquoque Halfte, pp. 220 sqq. 


apostolus in Evangelistis quatuor 4 Zeitschrift fiir die historische 
eminentissimus.’ De consensu Theologie, 1874, 11. pp. 163 sqq. 
— evangelistarum, tom. 11. cap. Vi. ; > Das Neve Testament wm das 
ibid. tom. ili. p. 1085. Jahr 200. Theodor Zahn's Ge- 
3 Geschichte des Neutestament-  schichte . . . gepriift, 1889. 


lichen Kanons, 1888, Bd. i. 1 


Augus- 
tine, 
354-430. 


Close of 
Canon in 
the West. 


The Alogi: 


Name 
appears 
first in 
Epipha- 
nius. 


124 LECTURE Il. 

who thinks that both have drawn conclusions from 
false premises, and that the Alogi of the second 
century—the Ur-Aloger as he calls them—are nothing 
more than the invention of Harnack.* The name 
occurs first in Epiphanius,’ who is proud of his 
pun, and begs others to call those who denied 
the Johannine Logos by the name which he gave 
them, A-logoi, creatures deprived of reason, as they 
were. It is of course possible that he borrowed his 


_ pun, as he certainly borrowed his matter, from Hip- 


polytus, who wrote, as we know from the inscription 
on the chair of his statue, a work on the Gospel and 
Apocalypse of 5. John.2  Hippolytus may have 
named the Alogi in his own now lost Syntagma of 
Thirty-two Heresies, may have derived his information 
from Irenzeus, and may have meant the persons whom 
Ireneeus (though he mentions Marcion, with whom 
he contrasts them in the same short paragraph) does 
not think worthy of more than the following notice :-— 

But others, in order that they might make void the gift 
of the Spirit which was in the last times poured out upon 
mankind at the Father’s good pleasure, do not admit that 
idea which is peculiar to John’s Gospel, that is, that the 


Lord promised He would send the Paraclete, but they cast 
away at once both the Gospel and the prophetic spirit.° 


° Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaft- 
liche Theologie, 1889, iii. 330-348. 

7 Ti φάσκουσι τοίνυν οἱ 'Αλογοι ; 
Ταύτην γὰρ αὐτοῖς τίθημι τὴν ἐπωνυ- 
μίαν " ἀπὸ γὰρ τῆς δεῦρο οὕτως κληθή- 
σονται, καὶ οὕτως, ἀγαπητοὶ, ἐπιθῶ- 
μεν αὐτοῖς ὄνομα, τουτέστιν ἤΑἈλογοι. 
Εἶχον γὰρ τὴν αἵρεσιν καλουμένην, 


ἀποβάλλουσαν ᾿Ιωάννου τὰς βίβλους. 
Ἐπεὶ οὖν τὸν λόγον οὐ δέχονται τὸν 
παρὰ ᾿Ιωάννου κεκηρυγμένον, "Αλογοι 
κληθήσονται. Heres. li. 3; Oehler, 
Corpus, ii. pt. 11. p. 50. 

8 Cf. Lecture VII. p. 362. 

® Adv. ‘Heres. iii. 11. 9; ed. 
Harvey, li. p. 51. 


LECTURE III. 125 


Heresy makers who are intent on extending their 
catalogues do not find it difficult to create a sect out 
of very doubtful materials, as anyone who will con- 
sult the pages of Philaster’ or Epiphanius,? or the 
histories by Lipsius* or Hilgenfeld,* may readily see ; 
and theory makers who are intent upon. spinning 
their webs do not find it difficult from a very small 
amount of fact to cover a large field of fancy, as we 
shall have more than abundant occasion to observe in 
the course of these lectures. 

But if the Alogi represent anything real at all, or 
anything more than an argument pressed here and 
there, on internal grounds alone, against the Fourth 
Gospel and the Apocalypse, by some stray persons 
who did not approve the doctrine’ which they con- 
tained, the whole line of the evidence, such as it is, 
tends to confirm the Apostolic authorship. For it 
ascribes these writings to the quite impossible Cerin- 
thus, or in any case to his time; and in doing so it 
declares that objectors to the Fourth Gospel in the 
second or the early third century, could find no place 
or period for its composition, but that which is as 
necessary to the Johannine authorship, as it is 
vehemently denied by modern negative criticism. 
But the whole position of the Alogi in this argu- 


1 Oehler, Corpus, tom. 1. christenthums, 1884. 

2 Ibid. tom. ii. ° Rein dogmatischer Art, und 

5. Zur Quellen-Kritik des Epi-  darum fiir die historische Kritik 
phanios, 1865. Quellen der dltesten bedeutungslos.’ Credner, Hinlei- 
Ketzergeschichte, 1875. tung, 1836, ὃ 103, p. 261. 

4 Die Ketzergeschichte des Ur- 


They 
ascribe 
the Gospel 
to Cerin- 
thus. 


Rejection 
by Zeller, 


126 


LECTURE IT. 


ment is not more than that of a weapon which is 


seized in desperation to meet an opponent. 


As long 


ago as 1845 it was openly cast aside by Dr. Zeller 
in an article against the Johannine authorship of 


the Gospel which was published in the Tiibingen 


Year-Book.® 


(And ort! 16:°a 


weapon which is fatal to 


the user when the opponent is armed by knowledge 


6 © Wie wenig eine geschichtlich 
nachweisbare Tradition iiber das 
Johannesevangelium vorhanden 
war, zeigt auch der Widerspruch, 
welcher um das Ende des zweiten 
Jahrhunderts von den _ sog. 
Alogern gegen dasselbe erhoben 
wurde. Ks ist wahr, die Griinde, 
auf welche sich dieser Wider- 
spruch stiitzt, sind, so weit wir 
von ihnen wissen, durchaus dem 
Gebiete der inneren Kritik ent- 
nommen, und auch das urspriing- 
liche Motiv desselben scheint 
das dogmatische gewesen zu sein, 
den Montanisten die Stiitze zu 
entziehen, welche ihnen die 
Johanneischen Ausspriiche iber 
den Paraklet darboten. Insofern 
moégen sich die Vertheidiger des 
Evangeliums nicht mit Unrecht 
dagegen verwahren, dass die 
Aloger als Zeugen fiir eine dem- 
selben entgegenstehende Tradition 
gebraucht werden. Jaauch das 
méchte ich nicht geradezu behaup- 
ten, dass die Aloger ihren Wider- 
spruch gegen eine allgemein als 
apostolisch anerkannte Schrift 
nicht halten wagen kénnen: die 
Apokalypse war diess in Kleinasien 
ohne Zweifel, und doch wurde 
sie von ihnen fiir ein Werk des 
Cerinth erklirt. Der Verfasser 


der Clementinen wagt sogar, 
die Authentie der mosaischen 
Biicher zu bezweifeln, was in 
jener Zeit ungleich mehr hiess, 
als die einer neutestamentlichen 
Schrift in Anspruch nehmen. 
Um so mehr zeigt aber der ganze 
Verlauf dieses Streits, so weit wir 
von ihm wissen, wie wenig es sich 
hier iberhaupt um Fragen der 
litterarischen Kritik handelte. 
Die Aloger bestreiten das Evan- 
gelium wegen seiner inneren 
Beschaffenheit, und Ireniius ant- 
wortet darauf, es miisse unsere 
vier kanonischen Evangelien 
geben, weil es auch vier Himmels- 
gegenden und vier Hauptwinde 
gebe, und weil die Cherubim 
viererlei Gestalten haben. An 
die Frage, von der die Entschei- 
dung des Streits doch zuniichst 
abhieng, die Frage nach den 
Zeugnissen fiir den apostolischen 
Ursprung des  LEvangeliums, 
scheint Niemand gedacht zu haben. 
Das ist das historische Bewusstsein 
der Kirche am Ende des 2 ἢ Jahr- 
hunderts.’ Zeller, Die dusseren 
Zeugnisse tiber das Dasein wnd 
den Ursprung des vierten Hvange- 
liums. Theologische Jahrbiicher, 
1845, pp. 645-6. 


DECTURE: ΠῚ 121 
The records of the 
past are searched and re-searched for men who reject 
the Fourth Gospel. No living men can be found: 
the ghosts of Alogi are said to be seen in the 
darkness. 


and turns it back upon him. 


But there were real men—Celsus, Julian, 
Porphyry, Arius, are instances—to whose position 
it was as vital to deny the authenticity of the Fourth 
Gospel, as it is to their nineteenth century suc- 
cessors. History supplies no hint that any one of 
them ever made the attempt. Their silence becomes 
only the more emphatic when it is broken by the 
inaudible whispers of Alogi, and utters witness 


more decisive than even the all-consentine voices 


of the Church.’ 


Accepting then the fact, which is hardly ques- 
tioned, and with our present knowledge is really not 
questionable, that from the last quarter of the second 


7 Since this was written I find 
that Dr. Salmon has lately ex- 
pressed the following opinion :— 
‘In fact I now believe that 
“the Alogi” consisted of Caius, 
and, as far as I can learn, nobody 
else. . . . 1 consider the work of 
Hippolytus, of which Epiphanius 
made use, must have said very 
little about the opponents of the 
Gospel. When Epiphanius deals 
with the opponents of the Apoca- 
lypse, the objections and replies 
have every mark of antiquity, and 
were no doubt derived from Hip- 
polytus. But the section on the 
Gospel is distinctly Epiphanius’s 


own. He cites authors later than 
Hippolytus: Ephraem (c. 22); 
Porphyry (c. 8). The system of 
chronology is not that of Hippo- 
lytus, nor does he agree with 
Hippolytus as to the duration of 
our Lord’s ministry on earth. 
The whole section gives me the 
impression that Epiphanius, being 
obliged by his title to answer 
objections to the Gospel, and 
finding none specified in his au- 
thorities, was reduced to manu- 
facture objections, as well as 
answers, by his own ingenuity.’ 
Introduction to the New Testament, 
ed. 4, pp. 229-31, note. 


Their 
negative 
witness. 


Principles 
of the 
reception, 


Views 
now 
commonly 
held: 


The 
authority 


128 LECTURE III. 


century to the close of the eighteenth century, the 
Fourth Gospel was received throughout Christendom 
as an Apostolic and inspired writing, we proceed 
further to inquire, in order that we may have a clear 
view of the ‘judgment of centuries,’ upon what prin- 
ciples this acceptance was based. The object of our 
immediate inquiry is the Fourth Gospel only, and if 
our principles prove to be often of wider application 
than is necessary for the task which we are under- 
taking, and to refer to the New Testament generally, 
we must be content to limit our inferences to our 
own part of the subject. And perhaps to some 
the inquiry will gain in clearness if we first approach 
it from the standpoint of the present, rather than 
from that of the past. 

Now if the question were put to a number of 
ordinary Christian men and women: ‘ What is your 
own ground for accepting the Fourth Gospel as a 
sacred book coming to you from God, and in what 
sense do you understand it to be so ?’, and if each 
one tried to answer frankly and fully, exactly as he 
thought, and not in the meaningless language of 
platitudes, some would find that they had hardly 
thought at all, and the answers of those who had 
thought would be on widely differing lines. But the 
most important of them would be something like the 
following :— 

One would say, 

‘T believe in the holy Catholic Church. I believe 
in the pure and Apostolic branch of it, in which by the 


LECTURE III. 129 


providence of God I was born, in which [I live, in 
which I hope to die. The Church has from the first 
received this writing as part of her sacred Scriptures. 
She has never had any doubt about it. She has not 
only been a witness to its reception as part of history, 
but has in her own sacred synods decreed its accept- 
ance as a doctrine. I recognize in the voice of the 
Church the voice of my Lord who promised to abide 
in the Church, and the voice of the Comforter whom 
He promised, to guide the Church into all truth; and 
IT accept this writing as vouchsafed unto me by God 
in and through His Church. 

‘And I accept it in the exact sense in which the 
Church accepts it. I do not find that she has. ever 
marked out a limit of inspiration, or that she has 
ever defined the matter or method of inspiration, and 
I do not draw lines where she has not done so. No 
attack on the external form of the sacred writing 
touches my faith in its inner substance as taught to 
me by the Church. Nor am I in any way alarmed 
by critical attacks upon the authenticity or genuine- 
ness of the book. I cannot judge of these subjects, 
and [ am not sure that it would be part of my duty 
to do so if I could. Do you tell me that in obedi- 
ence to Apostolic precept it is my duty ‘ to be ready 
always to give an answer to every man that asketh 
me a reason of the hope that isin me’? Yes; but 
the Apostle adds, ‘with meekness and fear,’ and he 
is addressing the body, not the individual member. 
The command, moreover, has no special reference to 

K 


of the 
Church. 


130 LECTURE III. 


the reception of a sacred book, and if it had, the 
knowledge of my fathers and brethren-—the authority 
of the Church—may be a better reason than my own 
ignorance. There is an ecclesia docens, but I form 
no part of it. The Church has always had, will 
always have, doctors and teachers, and will always 
have the divine Teacher. My duty is to obey, 
not to judge. 1 have indeed the right of private 
judgment and its responsibility. JI exercise it by 
submitting myself to the Church. Did I need other 
inducements to follow this which seems to me the 
only safe course, I should find them in the almost 
countless number of divisions and _ subdivisions 
of Christian people, all of whom base their often 
conflicting faiths on their own views and interpreta- 
tions of the Bible, and in the strange alarm of even 
Church people when some attack which for the 
moment seems successful, and may be really success- 
ful, is made, not on a doctrine of Scripture or of the 
Church, but on some accretion which is no part of 
either. As a Churchman, I am a member of a great 
household. The family has lived in the house for 
centuries. The signs of its historic past meet the eye 
at every turn—in the picture galleries, the libraries, 
the heraldic quarterings, the chapel, the mausoleum. 
There is an unwritten record going back beyond 
knowledge in its institutions, customs, traditions. 
Who will dare challenge its possession ? Who will 
question its title? And if anyone ignorant of its 
claims and history does so, the question is not one for 


LECTURE III. 151 


me but for the heads of the family. I seek to do my 
duty and live a peaceful life, anxious only about 
what affects the family from within, disturbed about 
nothing which threatens it from without. I know the 
sweet blessings of a corporate life, and of the sub- 
mission which is necessary to my own union with it.’ 

Such has been the language, not of weakness, but 
of strength ; not of ignorance, but of some of the 
greatest intellects in our own and in preceding gene- 
rations, in our own and in other branches of the 
Catholic Church of Christ. 

Now, for the man who accepts the authority of 
the Church, criticism upon such a question as the 
authenticity of the Fourth Gospel has no point of 
attack. The Church is for him ‘a witness and a 
keeper of holy Writ.’ He does not believe the 
Church to be infallible apart from Holy Scripture ; 
nay, he accepts her very creeds*® because they ‘may 
be proved by most certain warrants of’ Holy Scrip- 
ture, and if he is an Anglican churchman, he believes 
further that ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things 


by Dr. Hawkins, especially to the 
notes ; to the Bampton Lectwres 
of Bishop van Mildert, 1815, to 
those of Mr. W. D. Conybeare, 
1839 ; and to Dr. Salmon’s recent 
work, Infallibility of the Church, 
1888. And fora fuller discussion, 
to the works of H. J. Holtzmann, 


8 *Romanist writers admit the 
‘ sufficiency of Scripture for the 
proof at least of all the Articles in 
the three creeds.’ Dr. Hawkins, 
Bampton Lectures, 1840, p. 317. 
On the general question of 
Tradition and the Interpretation 
of Scripture, which is quite 


another question from that of the 
Canon and the Church which is 
noticed in the text above, the 
younger student may perhaps be 
referred to this standard treatise 


Kanon und Tradition, 1859 ; and 
Tanner (a Romanist), Ueber das 
katholische Traditions - und das 
protestantische Schrift - Princip, 
1862. 

kK 2 


The inner 
witness. 


135 LECTURE IIL. 


necessary to salvation.’ But the Church is to him 
the witness of what Scripture is ; she is ‘the house 
of God, which is the church of the living God, the 
pillar and ground of the truth.’? Hostile critics 
ask him to meet them and discuss these Scriptures. 
Certainly not; why should he? He is quite com- 
fortable, and quite safe in his walled city, where he 
has his life to live and his work to do. [5 it because 
there is no breach left in the wall that they ask him 
to meet them in one of the villages ? But he is doing 
a great work so that he cannot come down. Why 
should the work cease while he leaves it to come 
down to them ?' They threaten to attack his fortress 
and drive him out of it. But their weapons are not 
quite of the kind for this warfare. By all means let 
them seek others, read history and philosophy, study 
the Church’s foundations and her wondrous super- 
structure, confer with her master builders. Per- 
adventure the issue will be that they will themselves 
see the only place of safety to be within her walls. 

Another answer which in more or less definite 
language would be not unfrequently given, may be 
stated in terms like these :— 

‘I believe on other grounds than those contained 
in the Bible that God exists, and if He exists it is 
a priort probable that He will reveal Himself to man. 
There are other revelations of God, as in nature or 
in history, but the revealed word of God is the full 
utterance of the Creator to the creature. The Bible 

® 1 Tim. iii. 15. 1 Cf. Neh. vi. 1-4. 


LECTURE III. Raa 


comes to me with the attestation of prophecy and 
miracle and history, but the ultimate test of the 
word of God to me is, that it is a word of God to 
me. It finds me. It tells me of a Saviour. It 
converts my soul. It changes my life. I take 
counsel with my brother man and find that his expe- 
rience agrees with my own. I look at the work of 
missions and of Bible societies. It is quite certain 
that here is truth which human nature, as human 
nature, needs; and with which alone it is satisfied. 
You ask me how I know all this? How do I know 
light from darkness, bitter from sweet ? 

‘T say nothing about the extent or method of 
inspiration. ‘That is inspiration which inspires me. 
That is the word of God which speaks to my soul. 
I would rather not draw distinctions where I reverence 
all; but of course I know, as all Christian people 
know, that there are portions of the New Testa- 
ment which have an influence that others have not. 
The marked Bibles of devout Christians are a Bible 
within a Bible ; the texts of a spiritual ministry are the 
sacred words of life. No one would place the saluta- 
tions of the sixteenth chapter of the Romans, for ex- 
ample, side by side with the prologue to δ. John. The 
mass of Christian experience, as expressed in biogra- 
phies, letters, journals, asserts that the Fourth Gospel 
is a writing which most fully meets the wants of the 
great world of humanity. Tell the missionary to 
the most civilized or to the most barbarous heathen- 
dom, that he can have at present only one book of 


134 LECTURE II. 


the Bible translated into their new language. Which 
will he choose ? Tell a Christian philosopher or a 
Christian peasant, that he can only give one book of 
the Bible to his child. Which will he choose ? Go to 
the bed-side of some poor outcast in the slum of a 
great city, and ask to be allowed to read to him 
from a book of the New Testament ; endeavour to 
interest him by asking which is his favourite book. 
Which will he choose ? 

‘No question of criticism materially affects my 
position. If the contents are divine, the vessel is of 
comparatively small importance. If the word of 
God is certainly spoken, it matters little in what 
form or by what person it is spoken.’ 

Such is the lancuage of a large number of men 
of robust intellect, of holy and devoted lives, in our 
own and in other communions. 

And for the man who thus believes in the inner 
witness as the true test of Scripture, external criticism 
has no point of attack. 

‘Come and discuss with me,’ says the critic, 
‘whether your Scripture is divine.’ 

‘Discuss with you that about which I am quite 
sure, why should I? ‘There is no ground on which 
we can meet. I know my wants and what satisfies 
them, my life and what supports it, my inmost being 
and what fills it through and through.’ 

‘But I want to show you that the data of your 
consciousness are not trustworthy. You are guided 
by feeling ; I want to guide you by reason.’ 


LECTURE III. 139 


‘That is shifting the whole position. It is not 
the Fourth Gospel you wish to discuss, but human 
nature. I am quite content with the practical ex- 
perience of my own inner life and of that of millions 
who have gone before and of millions who are living 
now. ‘One thing 1 know, that whereas I was blind, 
now I see. . . . Why herein is a marvellous thing, 
that ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath 
opened mine eyes. . . . If this man were not of God, 
he could do nothing.’ ’ ” 

A third answer, which I find more difficulty in 
expressing because I have seldom known men who 
consistently hold it, though not a few profess it ; and 
because I do not know any standard work of any 
English body of Christians which declares it, is that 
of verbal inspiration. It is not inconsistent with, 
and as a matter of fact is sometimes held in conjunc- 
tion with, either of the previous theories ; though it 
can be held by a loyal child of the Church who accepts 
her authority only together with the conviction that 
the Church herself holds it. A man who gives this 
answer might use much of the language which we 
have just supposed others to use, but he would 
add :— 

‘When I speak of the Scriptures, I mean the whole 
Scriptures, the Bible and nothing but the Bible.’ I 
understand the language of the New Testament to 


2 John ix. 26, :30;:33: Plumptre, in Masters in English 
3 Cf. a striking lecture on Theology, 1877, pp. 113-145. 
‘William Chillingworth’ by Dean 


Verbal 
inspira- 
tion. 


136 LECTURE III. 


teach me the sacredness of every jot and tittle of 
the Old Testament, and to promise me a like full 
and infallible, verbally, literally inspired word of 
God. I mean that every statement and circumstance, 
scientific and historical as well as doctrinal, is ne- 
cessarily and exactly true. If modern science and 
history and literature disagree with any of these 
statements, so much the worse for modern science 
and history and literature.* I accept the Gospel 
according to ὃ. John, just as I accept the Epistle of 
Ὁ. Jude. I do not trouble myself with details of 
criticism or of authenticity, nor do 1 care much for 
questions of text or translation. I take my fathers’ 
English Bible, which has come to me in the provi- 
dence of God, as the absolutely sacred and absolutely 
perfect word of God, the unerring guide and chart 
of my life. The Holy Spirit who dictated it will 
protect it and will interpret it.’ 

Perhaps this state of thought and feeling is not 
often expressed in definite forms of language; but 
it lies at the root of no small portion of the less 
educated, it may be, but not the less real religious 
life and activities of this and other countries. 

The man who believes in this mechanical verbal 
inspiration of Holy Scriptures must admit that dis- 
coveries in science, and investigations of history, and 
the whole development of modern criticism, have 
made his position, to say the least, exceedingly diffi- 


* *Wer will wagen, die Auto- Calovius; see Herzog-Plitt, Real- 
ritiit eines Copernicus iiber die Hncyklopiidie, iii. p. 76. 
des heiligen Geistes zu stellen ἢ ἢ 


LECTURE III. d less 


cult ; but he must defend himself. We shall see that 
his theory is no part of the ‘judgment of centuries,’ 
no part of the Church’s judgment at all. 

One more answer would come to us from so many 
persons of high culture and attainment, that it would 
deserve the most careful attention at our hands. 
This answer is also not inconsistent with some of 
the language which we have already considered, and 
as a matter of fact often co-exists with it :— 

‘The Fourth Gospel,’ one of these persons 
would say, ‘must be judged primarily just as any 
other writing would be, by the ordinary canons 
of literary evidence and criticism, and I accept 
it because it satisfies those canons. I have this 
difficulty about the authority of the Church taken 
absolutely alone—it may be the best authority for 
the masses, and | have not a word to say against it 
—but for myself, as a critic accustomed to weigh 
evidence, there is the difficulty that I am asked to 
accept the Fourth Gospel and other Scriptures on 
the authority of the Church, and the Church on the 
authority of the Scriptures. The world rests upon 
the elephant, and the elephant rests upon the tortoise ; 
the tortoise cannot then rest upon the world. The 
argument is not free from the vice of the circle. 

‘And I have this difficulty about the inner witness 
—that it varies with the individual. For example, if I 
were making for my own edification a Canon of the 
writings which were read in the Church in the early 
centuries, I should include the Epistle of Clement or 


Canons of 
historical 
and 
literary 
criticism. 


138 LECTURE III. 


the letter to the Laodiceans or the Epistle to Diogne- 
tus, rather than the Second Epistle of $. Peter or the 
Epistle of S. Jude. If I were drawing the line between 
the Canonical and the apocryphal books of the Old 
Testament, I should value the wondrous teaching of 
the book of Wisdom more highly than some of the 
records of the books of Chronicles. If I am to think 
indeed of the Fourth Gospel only, the inner witness 
has been so unanimous, and the verification in the life 
of humanity so unique, that 1 am bound, regarding 
them merely as historical phenomena which stand quite 
alone, to accept the evidence as conclusive. Still my 
general position is, that this writing is to be judged as 
every other writing ; and | accept it as the authentic 
work of ὃ. John because this is the only theory which 
explains all the complicated facts of the case. It is 
not free from difficulty—but no question of historical 
criticism of the first or second century is, or can be— 
and it is infinitely more free from difficulty than any 
other theory which has been suggested to explain the 
same facts. As a mere question of history and criti- 
cism, and writing for writing, altogether apart from 
the contents, I have much more reason to accept the 
Fourth Gospel as the work of the Apostle, than 1 
have to accept the histories of Herodotus or Thucy- 
dides or Xenophon, of Tacitus or Livy or Cesar,’ 
as genuine documents. And if I am convinced that 


Ὁ It is, of course, generally ment date from the fourth to the 
known, but it is not always re- sixth, and the Versions and text 
membered, that while the great can be traced to the second and 
Uncial MSS. of the New Testa- third centuries, there is no known 


LECTURE III. 139 


it is the work of the Apostle, it follows that it is an 
authentic record of the life and teaching of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and the fullest spiritual truth which 
can be presented to the soul.’ 

The man who gives this answer would of course 
feel that any challenge of criticism must be met upon 
its own ground; that the wounds of reason can be 
healed only by reason ; that the authenticity of the 
Fourth Gospel is a question of history and evidence 
and not one of dogma ; that the witness and keeping 
of the Church is a fact of first importance ; that the 
consciousness of humanity is a fact of first importance, 
but that these facts are to take their place with all 
others ; that the objections of critics cannot be met 
in the nineteenth century as Tertullian met the ob- 
jections of heretics in the second century by prescrip- 
tion or demurrer; but that the whole case must be 
brought into open court and tried at the bar of 
justice and truth, with acknowledged experts as 
judges, and for a jury honest men who will shape 
their verdict by the evidence alone. 


These general remarks upon the way in which the 


manuscript of Herodotus or of Bekker, 1844, vol. i. p. 578. 
Thucydides earlier than the tenth, Nor are the Latin classical his- 
nor of Xenophon earlier than tories better attested. The first 
from the eleventh to the thir- six books of the Annals of Tacitus, 
teenth centuries. There is no for example, depend upon one 
reference in existing literature to manuscript, which was written 
Thucydides, the chief authority ποῦ earlier than the ninth century, 
for the history of Greece, for and was discovered in Westphalia 
two centuries after his death. in the sixteenth century. 

See Polybius, Hist. viii. 13 ; ed. 


Treatment 
of ques- 
tion in 
Apostolic 
age: 


Terms 
used. 


140 LECTURE III. 


question now presents itself will help us to under- 
stand the principles upon which this and other sacred 
writings have been received at different periods in 


the history of the Church. 


In the Apostolic age, if we may draw conclusions 
from the New Testament itself, there is no traceable 
idea of any new collection of writings for the use of 
the Church. The only hint of a word having been 
written by our Lord’s hand, is of a writing upon 
the sand of the floor; and there is no suggestion 
that He directed His disciples to write. Nor is 
there in the special gifts of the Spirit to the Church, 
the charismata which were to qualify men for the 
service which God called them to render to mankind 
—many and varied though they were—any reference 
to writing or qualifications for authorship. The 
terms used in the history of the promulgation of 
the Gospel and the foundation of the Church never 
include the idea of writing, and they express every 
cognate idea so fully that they must be taken to 
exclude it. We read of ‘proclaiming good news,’ 
of ‘preaching,’ of ‘exhorting, of ‘speaking,’ of 
‘hearing,’ of ‘ testifying,’ of ‘handing down’; of 
‘the Gospel,’ of ‘the Word,’ of ‘ tradition,’ of 
‘witness, of ‘the opening of the mouth’; of 
‘the preacher,’ of ‘the evangelist,’ of ‘ the mission- 
ary. ® §. Paul’s question is: ‘How then shall 
they call on him in whom they have not believed ? 


ὁ Cf. Reuss, Geschichte der heiligen Schriften, Neues Testament, ed. 
6, § 36. 


LECTURE III. 141 


and how shall they believe in him whom they have 
not heard ? and how shall they hear without a 
preacher?’ And his answer is, ‘So belief cometh of 
hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ.’ 

It does not appear that any one of the writers of 
the New Testament thought of his writing as one 
which would become of general use in the Church, 
or would be read apart from the oral teaching which 
had been already communicated, and which formed 
the substance of the ‘faith once delivered to the 
saints.’ No writing is addressed to persons to whom 
the truth was not otherwise known. Many of the 
writings are largely personal, and those intended 
for public reading were for individual churches, and 
for churches connected with them, and with the 
writer. 

So far from setting before themselves the task of 
providing Scriptures for a future Church, there is no 
evidence that any of the Apostolic writers expected 
that there would be a Church on earth far beyond 
the generation in which they themselves lived. For 
them, the sacred Scriptures are the writings of Moses 
and of the Prophets. They would have shrunk, 
with the reverence of Jews, from placing their own 
writings by the side of the closed Canon of the Old 
Testament. ‘The only clear instance’ in which the 

ΤΑ friendly critic invites my is worthy of his reward,’ as 
attention to 1 Tim. v. 18, ‘For another instance, and one which 
the scripture saith, Thou shalt disproves my assertion. But a 


not muzzle the ox that treadeth careful study will show that it is 
out the corn. And, Thelabourer exactly in accord with the asser- 


Oral tra- 
dition 
and 
writings. 


Reasons 
why early 
Church 
did not 
provide a 
Canon. 


New Tes- 
tament 
not re- 
garded as 
‘Scrip- 
ture.’ 


In the 
post- 
Apostolic 
age 


142 LECTURE III. 


term ‘Scripture’ is applied in the New Testament to 
any part of the New Testament itself, is in the Second 
Epistle of 5. Peter,® where reference is made to a 
collection of Pauline Epistles ; and your knowledge 
will prevent your laying too much stress upon this 
passage. No part of the New Testament is quoted in 
the New Testament, as an authority for a fact or for 
a doctrinal statement. ὃ. John must have been 
acquainted with some form of one or more of the 
earlier Gospels, of portions of the Acts of the 
Apostles, of the teaching of 5. Peter and 5. Paul, 
especially, as his writings show, with the Epistles to 
the Ephesians, Colossians, and Timothy; but he 
never quotes or refers to them in the Fourth Gospel 
or inhis Epistles. They were not to him Scriptures. 
5. Paul more than once appeals to a fact of the 
Gospel history, and does so as late as the Second 
Epistle to Timothy, but the reference is not made 
to any writing, but to ‘my Gospel,’ that is, to his 
own oral teaching of the truth.’ 


And as it was in the age of the Apostles, so was 
it also in the generation which immediately followed. 
There is comparatively little of formal quotation from 
the New Testament Scriptures in any of the Apostolic 
Fathers. Sentences and words occur, some of which 
tion. The term ‘scripture’ is context, even to the word of the 
applied to the quotation, if it be Lord Himself. 
one—cf. Alford’s note im loco— 8 2 Peter iii. 16. 


from the Old Testament, and is ° εὐαγγέλιόν pov: 2 Tim. ii. 8. 
not applied in the immediate Cf. Rom. ii. 16; xvi. 25. 


LECTURE IIL. 143 


are so exactly parallel as to make it impossible to be- 
lieve that the writers were not making definite refer- 
ence to our present Canonical Scriptures of the New 
Testament. Ihave elsewhere referred to the fact that 
the Johannine current of thought coloured the teaching 
and wording of the Didache, of Barnabas, of Clement, 
of Ignatius, of the Shepherd; though it did not leave 
the writer’s hands until the stream of traditional 
teaching and of the synoptic Gospels was already 
full and strong.’ But while we have this evidence of 
the existence of the Gospels, they are not quoted by 
name, they are not quoted as authorities, they are 
quoted together with an oral traditional Gospel, and 
perhaps together with written Gospels which are not 
It will be remembered that there are 
several sayings of our Lord known, which do not 


now extant. 


occur in any Canonical writing.’ On the other hand, 
the Old Testament Scriptures are quoted as they are 
in the New Testament; that is, in the circle of the 
Apostolic Fathers as in the circle of the Apostles, it 
is the Old Testament and not the New Testament 
which is definitely regarded as Scripture,® as the 
‘word of the Lord.’ 4 


1 Cf. Lecture II. p. 101; and 
Lecture VII. p. 402. 

2 Cf. Westcott, Introduction to 
the Gospels, Appendix C; and 
especially Von Gebhardt und 
Harnack, Texte wind Untersuch- 
ungen, Bd. v. Heft 4. Resch, 
Agrapha Aussercanonische Hvan- 
gelienfragmente, 1889. 


3 The passage in Polycarp, 
cap. xil., which is referred to by 
Bishop Wordsworth in his note 
on 1 Tim. v. 18, is primarily a 
quotation of the LXX Version 
of Ps. iv. 4. 

4 *The title the Word of God, 
though common afterwards, and 
especially in modern times, is 


Johannine 
influence. 


Reference 
to the 

‘Word of 
the Lord.’ 


Examples. 


144 LECTURE III. 


But in the Apostolic period there had already 
grown up quite naturally by the side of the ‘ word 
of the Lord,’ contained in the Old Testament, the 
custom of referring to the word of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. He was the Lord. He was the Word. 
What He said was the very word of God. The 
Apostles could not place their own words as authori- 
tative by the side of the Old Testament Scriptures ; 
but these sacred Scriptures were fulfilled in Him. 
‘The word of the Lord endureth for ever: and this 
is the word which by the Gospel is preached unto 
you.’° 
Again, the Apostolic period gives a rule of practice 
to that which followed it. In the post-Apostolic 
age, when the current of oral teaching in individual 
churches was vigorous, and had been strengthened by 
evangelic records and letters ; and now above all when 
the tradition of the Ephesian church had been per- 
fected by the Fourth Gospel, and communion between 
the churches was being established, and ecclesiastical 
literature was putting forth its first efforts, the con- 
stant appeal is made to the ‘word of the Lord,’ to 
the ‘commands of the Lord,’ to ‘thus saith the 


never used as a title of Scripture 
generally by any of the New 
Testament writers. No quotation 
is headed ‘‘ As it is written in the 
Word of God,” ‘ What saith the 
Word of God?” &c. No state- 
ment concerning Scripture is 
introduced by mention of this 
title. Yet it is a phrase used, in 
one or other of its many forms, 


some hundred times in all, and 
clearly, therefore, could not have 
been omitted asa title of Scrip- 
ture except on the ground that 
in the Apostles’ days it was not 
so applied.’ Warington, Inspira- 
tion, 1867, p. 46. Cf. the valua- 
ble Appendix, pp. 273-8. 
5.1 Peter 1. 25. 


LECTURE III. 145 


Lord. It will be remembered how emphatically 
this is the case in the two works which are connected 
with the name of the Eastern archbishop, Bryen- 
nios, the so-called Second Epistle of Clement, and 
the Didache. The latter writing is, indeed, entitled 
‘The Teaching of the Lord, by means of the Twelve 
Apostles.’® We have seen that the five books of Papias 
are called ‘ Hxpositions of the Sayings of the Lord, * 
and that in Justin the Memoirs of the Apostles ὃ 
are quoted for their constant reference to the sayings 
of the Lord. ‘The few lines from Papias which are 
preserved in Eusebius are of special interest in illus- 
trating the thought of the post-Apostolic Church. 
He seeks ‘not for foreign precepts, but for those 
which are given from the Lord to our faith,’ and 
tells us that he ‘did not profit so much from books 
as’—and the phrase is very remarkable—‘ from the 
living and abiding voice.” That is his comment, 
as it is S. Peter’s comment, on the text, ‘ The word 
of the Lord endureth for ever.’ It is the living 
voice, the voice of the Lord in the Church, ‘ the word 
which by the gospel is preached unto you,’ which 
abideth for ever. 

This means, and the study of the Apostolic 
Fathers and of the fragments preserved in Eusebius 


6 ςΔιδαχὴ τῶν δώδεκα ἀποστό- 8 Cf. ibid. pp. 65 sqq. 
Awv’ καὶ 6 Διδαχὴ Κυρίου διὰ τῶν 5. παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ μενούσης. 
δώδεκα ἀποστόλων τοῖς ἔθνεσιν Hist. Eccles. 111. 89. Butcf. Zahn’s 
Ed. Bryennios, 1883, p. 2. interpretation of these words, 
7 Aoyiwy κυριακῶν ἐξήγησις. Cf. Geschichte des Neutestamentlichen 
Lecture II. p. 96. Kanons, 1889, Bd. i. p. 866. 


L 


Individual 
churches 


and 
writings. 


Idea of a 
Catholic 
Church 
not yet 
realized. 


146 LECTURE III. 


will serve to remind us, that the Church in the first 
vigour of her life felt no need for, and had no cause to 
form, a Canon of her writings. The writings, let us 
bear in mind, were to a considerable extent the pro- 
perty of individual churches. Some of the Epistles 
contained references to matters of a private and not 
always very creditable nature ; some contained special 
injunctions which had no meaning for other churches ; 
some contained injunctions to individual persons. 
Nor did all churches at first possess, or perhaps care 
to possess, copies of all the Gospels. Each church 
had its own founder, its own present teachers, its own 
special characteristics, its own oral Gospel, in some 
cases its own Apostolic Epistle. The Catholicity and 
corporate life of the whole Church had from the first 
existed in idea; but to work it out in practice was 
still in the future. No one who knows the history 
of the Church in the post-Apostolic age will demand 
a Canon of her writings at that period; and the 
apologist who attempts to answer the demand is 
doing no true service to the writings or to the 
Church. There were canons of the churches, rather 
than a Canon of the Church, side by side with 
the ‘living voice,’ and the ‘word of the Lord.’ 
The Canonicity of the New Testament could not be, 
until the Catholicity of the Church was. The first 
framers of a Canon, and the first who largely quoted 
the Scriptures of the New Testament, were not the 
Catholics, but the heretics. The Church had no 
need to quote them. She had her full living voice 


LECTURE III. 141 


and her teachers to whom she could appeal in case 
of doubt or difficulty. But when the Gnostics and 
other heretics quoted texts of the Church’s writings, 
and adduced other writings in support of their own 
views ; and when they alleged a secret traditional 
interpretation by which even the writings of the 
churches were made to support their heresies, the 
churches were driven to the task of comparing 
and deciding upon their own Apostolical books ; and 
the Church was obliged to draw up her Canon and 
her own traditional interpretation, her rule of faith, 
her first forms of creed, by which the meaning of 
these books should be fixed. 

The materials of the Canon in the second century, 
then, were, the tradition of the Church in her living 
voice, the written evangelic statements of the words 
of the Lord, the Apostolic letters, the records of 
Apostolic teaching in the Acts, and the prophetic 
Revelation of 5. John. 

The fundamental principle was to ascertain what 
was truly the word of the Lord Jesus. This did not 
necessarily imply any writing. As late as Irenzus, 
who thinks of the four-fold Gospel as consonant with 
the natural order of things, it is still possible to con- 
ceive of a Church without a Bible, but not of a Bible 
without a Church.’ But with this tradition, there 


ecclesias? Cui ordinationi assen- 
tiunt multz gentes barbarorum 


1 ¢Quid autem si neque Apostoli 
quidem Scripturas  reliquissent 


nobis, nonne oportebat ordinem 
sequi traditionis, quam _ tradi- 
derunt iis quibus committebant 


eorum qui in Christum credunt, 
sine charta vel atramento scrip- 
tam habentes per Spiritum in 


EY 


A Catholic 
Canon 
becomes 
necessary. 


The Canon 
a question 
of history 


not of 
dogma. 


In the 
third and 
fourth 
centuries, 


148 LECTURE III. 


was the exercise of judgment upon the writings. 
Did the so-called Gospels come from the earliest 
direct sources of knowledge, that is, were they imme- 
diately or mediately Apostolic ? Were the other 
writings from Apostolic sources ? The acceptance of 
a writing did not rest upon the decree of any council, 
for the time of councils was not yet. The Canon was 
a question of history, not one of dogma ; and churches 
might differ, and did differ, and Fathers of the 
Church might differ from each other, and sometimes 
be inconsistent with themselves—and did differ and 
were inconsistent—as to the use of the doubtful 
books or the exact principle on which a book should 
be received. Tradition, but tradition critically tested 
in the presence of heresy, was the first formative 
principle of the Canon. The New Testament was 


the child of the Church. 


As we pass from the second century onwards, we 
find that the current of tradition flowed necessarily 
in wider channels, but with less fulness and force. 
Men were no longer in the presence of those who 
had themselves known the immediate descendants of 
Apostles ; and with the growth of Christian literature 
there came the fuller power of criticism, and the 
wider opportunities for exercising it. And there were 
cordibus suis salutem, et veterem authorities in Tanner, Ueber das 
traditionem diligenter custo- katholische Traditions - u. das pro- 
dientes.’ Irenzeus, Adv. Her. _ testantische Schrift-Princip, pp. 


iii. 4, 1; ed. Harvey, tom. ii. p. 4-8. 
16. Cf. the valuable collection of 


LECTURE‘? III. 149 


The sacred books stood out 
more and more prominently, as the presence of the 
original tradition was less fully felt, and they became 
the centres round which that tradition was deposited 
The 


tradition of the second century became in the third and 


giants in those days. 


in continuous expositions and commentaries. 


following centuries, one with the sacred Scriptures. 
Witness the commentaries and homilies of Origen, 
Cyprian, Augustine, Jerome, Basil, Chrysostom, the 
Gregorys of Nyssa and Nazianzus, and the Cyrils of 
Jerusalem and Alexandria. 

There is no fallacy of the vicious circle then in 
the paradox which is simply historical truth, that the 
Scriptures depend upon the Church, and the Church 
The relation of the 
mutual dependence varied in different circumstances. 


depends upon the Scriptures. 


There is a young mother carrying her boy who can- 


not yet walk alone. Years pass on. There is a 
woman leaning upon the arm of a strong man whose 
strength has been born of her and now supports her. 
It is the same mother ; the same child. 

How rapidly the sacred Scriptures of the New 
Testament became part of the daily life of the 
Church, and how precious men held them to be, 
we recognize as early as the Diocletian persecution 
at the opening of the fourth century, when they 
chose to die rather than to part with them ; and 
how fully tradition continued to hold its place side 
by side with the Bible, as late as the close of the 


century, is seen in the declaration of Augustine, 


tradition 
one with 
Scrip- 
tures. 


The 
Scriptures 
depend 

on the 
Church, 
the 
Church 

on the 
Scrip- 
tures. 


Testi- 
mony of 


Augus- 
tine, 


and 
Jerome. 


150 LECTURE IIT. 


‘I would not believe the Gospel unless the autho- 
rity of the Church should move me thereto.’? Here 
we have language than which none could be more 
plain, and it by no means stands alone, in which 
Scripture is made to depend absolutely upon the 
authority of the Church. While the same Father 
declares also—and, again, the language by no means 
stands alone—that ‘all things necessary to faith and 
morals are comprised in the sacred Scriptures,’ and 
‘that the Christian system will come to an end if the 
authority of these writings is allowed to waver.’ ® 

Jerome, to take another example, when speaking 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, illustrates in this way 
the general principle :— 


It does not matter who the author is as long as he is a son 
of the Church, and it is approved by being read in the daily 
lessons. But if the custom of the Latins does not receive it 
among the sacred and Canonical books, and the Greeks do not 
receive the Apocalypse, yet we receive both, for we are not 
careful to adapt ourselves to the custom of the present, but to 
follow the authority of the ancients.’ 


* *Kgo vero Evangeliononcre-_ vacillat auctoritas: porro fide 
derem, nisi me catholice ecclesie titubante, charitas etiam ipsa 
commoveret auctoritas.’? Contra languescit.? Ibid. i. 37; ed. 
Epist. Manich.—Fundam.—cap. Migne, p. 35. 

v.; ed. Migne, tom. viii. p. 176. * Ep. ad Dardanum. “ Et nihil 

5. ‘In iis enim quee aperte in  interesse, cujus sit, quum Eccle- 
Scripturis positasunt,inveniuntur _ siastici viri sit, et quotidie Eccle- 
illa omnia que continent fidem, siarum lectione celebretur. Quod 
moresque vivendi, spem scilicet si eam Latinorum consuetudo non 
atque charitatem.’ . . De Doctr. recipit inter Scripturas canonicas ; 
Christ. 11.9; ed. Migne, p. 42. nec Gracorum quidem Ecclesize 
‘Per fidem enim ambulamus, non apocalypsin Joannis eadem liber- 
per speciem; titubabit autem tate suscipiunt; et tamen nos 
fides, si divinarum Scripturarum utramque suscipimus ; nequaquam 


LECTURE III. 151 


We have seen that for the East the Canon was 
practically closed at the councils of Laodicea and 
Constantinople, and for the West at the councils of 
Hippo and Carthage.° 

From that time to the Reformation—that 15, for 
a period, in round numbers, of nine hundred years— 
there was no fresh investigation of the authority, 
almost no fresh interpretation of the substance of the 
Scriptures. ‘They were the years of Catena, of Postille, 
of commentaries, of compilations, which consisted of 
little more than of extracts from the Western Fathers, 
especially from Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Hilary. 
The Canon was now nota question of historical inves- 
tigation, but a dogma of the Church. From the time 
of Gregory the Great onwards, the pope was in effect 
the authority of the Canon throughout Western 
Christendom. 

It is customary to speak of the earlier centuries 
of this period as the Dark Ages; on many departments 
of literature and thought they certainly shed no 
light. They make little addition to our knowledge 
of the Bible. They received both the Scriptures and 
the interpretation of them, as the earlier centuries 
handed them down, without venturing to question 
either; but their sons lived the lessons which they 
received, with unhesitating faith, and in the spirit 
of absolute devotion. And what deeds they wrought 


hujus temporis consuetudinem, 
sed veterum Scriptorum auctori- 
tatem sequentes, qui plerumque 
utriusque abutuntur testimoniis’ 


. . . Epist. cxxix.; Opera, ed. 
Veron, 1734, tom. i. 965 B. 
5 Cf. supra, pp. 121 and 129. 


Canon 
accepted 
on autho- 
rity of the 


Church 
until the 
Re- 
formation. 


Accept- 
ance in 
the Dark 
Ages. 


152 LECTURE 1Π. 


by faith! These were the ages of missionaries, of 
the great religious orders, of crusades, of schoolmen. 
These ages founded monasteries and builded cathe- 
drals. ‘These ages established schools such as there 
were at Jarrow and York and Bec; universities at 
Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Paris. These ages 
witnessed in their darkest years lives such as those 
of Beda and Alcuin, and as the light dawned it shone 
upon Anselm, Roscelin, Abelard, Peter Lombard, 
John of Salisbury, Alexander de Hales, Bonaventura, 
Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, 
Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Bradwardine. 
If it is night, there are at least many bright stars 
in the firmament. It would be an interminable 


Fourth task to seek to trace the influence of the Fourth 
tees Gospel during this period. Where all were received, 
above all. and the Gospels more than all, the Fourth Gospel 

was most of all. If here and there a critical spirit, 

like Hugo of δ. Victor, or Abelard, raises the ques- 

tion, it is never to do other than honour to S. John.°® 
Miercd The position of the sacred Scriptures was not the 
ἩΘΗΗ primary question of the Reformation, but the struggle 
at the 


with Rome soon led to the seeking and the finding 
of an authority independent of the Roman church. 


® A full and able account of Bible? New York, 1888. They 


the general position of the Holy 
Scriptures in history is furnished 
in Professor Ladd’s Doctrine of 
Sacred Scripture, 2 vols. 1883, and 
in the same writer’s What is the 


are a valuable addition to other 
and better-known works, for the 
student who reads not without 
knowledge and thought. 


LECTURE III. 153 


There had been signs of an altered view of the Scrip- 
tural position in reformers before the Reformation, 
and this found a striking expression in the work of 
Bodenstein of Carlstadt.’ His principle is critical and 
historical, and he is as wholly opposed to the un- 
hesitating acceptance on the authority of pope or 
church, as he is to Luther’s test of subjective con- 
sciousness. He has three orders of rank. In the 
first he would place the Pentateuch—though he 
does not accept the Mosaic authorship—and the 
Gospels; in the second, the Jewish Prophets and 
the fifteen Epistles ; in the third, the Jewish Hagio- 
grapha and the seven Antilegomena of the New 
Testament. He would exclude even from the 
Apocrypha, the third and fourth books of Esdras, 
Baruch, Manasseh, and portions of Daniel. 

Luther’s own views are expressed in different 
passages in his works, especially in the prefaces to 
individual books; and although the expressions 
were modified as years passed on, they remain, as a 
whole, a definite outspoken assertion of his absolute 
right to judge for himself what was and was not 
sacred Scripture :— 

What does not teach Christ, that is not Apostolic, 
whether it be S. Peter or ὃ. Paul who teaches it ; but, on the 


other hand, what preaches Christ that is Apostolic, whether 
it be Judas, Annas, Pilate or Herod who teaches it.® 


7 De Canoncis Scripturis, shorter form for popular use, 
1520, 4to; best ed. in Credner, Welche Biicher heilig und biblisch 
Zur Geschichte des Kanons, pp. δεῦπα, 1520. 

291-412; published also in 8 Preface to the Epistle of S. 


Reforma- 
tion. 


Boden- 
stein of 
Carlstadt, 
1251: 
1641. 


Luther, 
1483- 
1546. 


Calvin, 
1509- 
1564. 


154 LECTURE III. 


Or let us take this view of the subjective recep- 
tion of God’s word :— 

It is true it is all God’s Word. But with God’s Word 
here and God’s Word there, I must know and consider to 
whom the Word of God is spoken. We are a long way 


still from the certainty that you are the people with whom 
God has spoken.® 


For Luther, that is, as for the Church of the first 
generations, the Canon is a Canon of the word of the 
Lord, and a writing is sacred and inspired just in 
proportion to the measure in which it contains that 
word. His test is the preaching of Christ, but of this 
he is himself the judge. 

Applying his test, he declares in his preface to 
the New Testament of 1524 :— 

To sum up, St. John’s Gospel and his first Epistle, St. Paul’s 
Epistles, especially those to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, 
and St. Peter’s first Epistle—these are the books that will 
show thee Christ and teach thee all that is necessary and 
blessed, though thou never more seest or hearest any other 


book or doctrine. St. James’s Epistle is therefore a right 
strawy Epistle, since it has no kind of Gospel.! 


The subjective position of Calvin is equally defi- 
nite, though at first he accepted the traditional 
view. He says :— 


Many are in this pernicious error, that the Scripture 
has only that importance which is given to it by the consent 
of the Church, as if the eternal and immutable truth of 
God was founded upon the pleasure of men. . . . And as 
concerns their question how do we know that the Scripture 


James and 5. Jude, 1522; Werke, ° Werke, ed. Walch, iii. p. 14. 
ed. Walch, 1744, xiv. pp. 148 sqq. 1 Ibid. xiv. p. 105. 


LECTURE III: 159 


“proceeds from God, if we do not have recourse to the decree 
of the Church, it is just as if anyone should ask us how we 
learn to discern light from darkness, white from black, sour 
from sweet.” 

Zwingli is not less positive :— 

Whoever asserts that the Gospel is nothing without the 
patronage and approval of the Church, errs and blasphemes 
against God. 

Meanwhile the council of Trent had taken its un- 
happy step, April 8, 1546, of canonizing all the books 
of the Vulgate, including the Apocrypha, basing the 
decision upon the usage of the Church, making all 
books of equal value, and anathematizing all who did 
not accept the decree. 

We are now concerned with these questions only 
as they affect the Fourth Gospel, and we will not 
pause to recall the history of the council, nor the 
strong differences of opinion on this subject in the 
council itself, and among Roman theologians without. 
Still less is it needful to recall the fact that the 
Anglican reformers were happily guided to avoid the 
extremes of both Rome and Geneva. 

One step was possible more fatal even than 
that of Trent, or the extremest position of a sub- 
jective decision. It was to declare the fallible, 
infallible ; the imperfect, perfect ; the human, divine. 
The Reformation had cast to the winds the claims 
to human infallibility as the outer form of the divine 

2 Institutiones, 1559, lib.i. cap. rich, 1523 ; Werke, ed. Schuler u. 


vii. p. 14. Schulthess, 1828, Bd. i. pp. 175- 
3 Thesis for Conference at Zii- 179. 


Zwingli, 
1484— 
1531. 


Council 
of Trent, 
1546. 


Infalli- 
bility of 
Scripture 
substi- 
tuted 


for in- 
fallibility 
of the 
Church. 


156 LECTURE IIL. 
infallibility of the Church ; but all her children had 
not learnt her truest lessons, and for the infallibility 
of man they substituted the infallibility of a book. 
Scripture became, in the period from a.p. 1600-1750, 
—first in the reformed churches, later in the 
Lutheran, then in general public opinion—identical 
with the word of the Lord. 
in the history of the Bible. You see what a weapon 
it gave the Protestant against the church of Rome. 
You see what a weapon it gave him against the 


It was a new departure 


sceptics. An infallible divine writing, the inspira- 
tion extending to words, letters, the Hebrew vowel- 
points,* the Greek breathings.° 


still remained, but the spirit and the need which re- 


The interpretation 


placed one infallibility by another quickly replaced 
Regule fide, Confessions, 
Articles, Institutes, Bodies of Divinity sprung up on 


one tradition by another. 


all sides, and became almost as sacred as the Scrip- 
tures themselves. 


* “In specie autem Hebraicus 
Veteris Testamenti Codex, quem 
ex traditione Kcclesizw Judaice, 
cuiolim Oracula Deicommissa sunt 
(Rom. 111. 2), accepimus hodieque 
retinemus, tum quoad consonas, 
tum quoad vocalia, sive puncta 
ipsa, sive punctorum saltem potes- 
tatem, et tum quoad res, tum 
quoad verba θεόπνευστος, ut 
fidei et vitz nostre, una cum 
codice Novi Testamenti sit Canon 
unicus et illibatus, ad cujus nor- 
mam, ceu Lydium lapidem, uni- 
verse, que extant, Versiones, 


sive orientales, sive occidentales 
exigendee, et sicubi deflectunt, 
revocande sunt.’ Formula Con- 
sensus Helvetica. Canon 11]. 
Augusti, Corpus Librorum Sym- 
bolicorum, 1827, pp. 445-6. 

δ᾽ “Tt is impious and profane 
audacity to change a single point 


‘in the Word of God, and to sub- 


stitute a smooth breathing for a 
rough one ora rough for asmooth.’ 
Calovius quoted in Ladd, The 
Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, vol. 
ii, p. 190. 


LECTURE III. Lad 


A weapon against the Roman! a weapon against 
the sceptic! but it was a two-edged sword, and none 
suffered such fearful wounds as those who essayed 
to wield it. It is against this modern human struc- 
ture that the science and criticism and history of the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have directed 
their shafts and pierced it through and through. 
And men thought they were destroying the divine. 
Little blame to them; little blame to anyone ; but 
tears of pity that men should raise their own puny 
defences and call them God’s, and that other men 
should mistake these human frailties for divine 
realities. He sitteth in the fortress of the eternal 
truth which needs no buttress of human building ; 
which men indeed have sometimes dared to attack, 
but as they have drawn nigh, they have gazed upon 
its wondrous strength and beauty, and have been 
led in humblest submission to yield themselves to 
the King. 

I have called this identification of Scripture with 
the word of God, this view of a mechanical, verbal, 
literal inspiration—for though I am seeking to avoid 
technical terms it is not possible to do so—a new 
departure, because the Church had never, has never, 
accepted it. Is it necessary to show that the 
Anglican communion has never done so? Her 
formularies and the works of her Fathers are in your 
hands. Let me but quote a statement from one of 
her trusted living teachers, whose nomination to the 
bishopric of Durham during the last week has been 


This in- 
fallibility 
attacked 
by modern 
criticism. 


Verbal in- 
spiration, 
a new de- 
parture. 


Opinions 
of 


Dr. 
Westcott, 


Bishop of 
Carlisle, 


Cardinal 
Newman, 


158 LECTURE ὙΠ’ 


received with a harmonious chorus of thanksgiving 
in which there is no discordant voice :— 


The purely organic theory of Inspiration rests on no 
Scriptural authority, and, if we except a few ambiguous 
metaphors, is supported by no historical testimony. It is at 
variance with the whole form and fashion of the Bible, and 
is destructive of all that is holiest in man, and highest in 
Religion, which seeks the co-ordinate elevation of all our 
faculties, and not the destruction of any one of them.® 


And let me remind you of the caution of one of 
her living Bishops, spoken in a Hulsean Lecture now 
thirty-five years ago :— 


And indeed it is a question worthy οἱ solemn considera- 
tion, whether almost as much mischief has not been done to the 
cause of Christian faith, by those who have endeavoured to 
force upon their brethren untenable views of the nature of 
Holy Scriptures, as by those who have rudely treated them 
as merely human books.’ 


That the Roman communion has never fully 
decreed this doctrine, even in the fatal steps of Trent 
and the Vatican, may be gathered from the following 
words of Cardinal Newman :— 


These two councils [the Tridentine and the Vatican] 
decide that the Scriptures are inspired, and inspired through- 
out, but not inspired by an immediately divine act, but 
through the instrumentality of inspired men; that they are 
inspired in all matters of faith and morals, meaning thereby, 
not only theological doctrine, but also the historical and pro- 
phetical narratives which they contain, from Genesis to the 
Acts of the Apostles; and lastly, that, being inspired because 


6 Westcott, Introduction to the Harvey Goodwin, Hulsean Lec- 
Study of the Gospels, ed. 4, p. 6. tures, 1855, pp. 79-80. 
τ Bishop of Carlisle, then Mr. 


LECTURE II. 159 


written by inspired men, they have a human side, which 
manifests itself in language, style, tone of thought, character, 
intellectual peculiarities, and such infirmities, not sinful, as 
belong to our nature, and which in unimportant matters 
may issue in what in doctrinal definitions is called an obiter 
dictum.® 

In a word, Inspiration of Scripture in omnibus suis par- 
tibus is one thing; in omnibus rebus is another.® 


This opinion of Cardinal Newman is supported 
by a recent utterance of the Bishop of Amzycla, 
assistant to the Archbishop of Westminster :— 


Catholics are under no sort of obligation to believe that 
inspiration extends to the words of Holy Scripture as well as 
to the subject-matter which is therein contained.! 


That English Protestants did not always think 
it necessary to accept the view of verbal infallibility, 
and that they did not shrink from teaching what they 
held, is proved by the following words from Richard 
Baxter’s Catechising of Families, and his opinion is 
by no means singular :— 


And here I must tell you of a great and needful truth, 
which ignorant Christians, fearing to confess, by over-doing, 
tempt men to infidelity. The Scripture is like a man’s body, 
where some parts are but for the preservation of the rest, and 
may be maimed, without death: the sense is the soul of the 
Scripture, and the letters but the body or vehicle. The doc- 
trine of the Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Decalogue, and 
Baptism, and Lord’s Supper, is the vital part, and Christianity 
itself. The Old Testament letter (written as we have it about 


8 What is of obligation for a 5 bid. Β. 2d. 
Catholic to believe concerning the 1 Inspiration, reprinted from 
Inspiration of the Canonical the Homiletical Magazine, 1884, 
Scriptures, 1884, pp. 4, 56. p. 195. 


Bishop of 
Amycla, 


Richard 
Baxter, 
1615- 
1691, 


Neander, 
1789- 
1850. 


160 LECTURE III. 


Ezra’s time) is that vehicle which is as imperfect as the reve- 
lation of those times was: but as after Christ’s incarnation 
and ascension the Spirit was more abundantly given, and the 
revelation more perfect and sealed, so the doctrine is more 
full, and the vehicle or body, that is the words, are less 
imperfect, and more sure to us; so that he that doubts of the 
truth of some words in the Old Testament, or of some small 
circumstantials in the New, hath no reason, therefore, to doubt 
of the Christian religion, of which these writings are but the 
vehicle, or body, sufficient to ascertain us of the truth of the 
history and doctrine. Be sure, first, that Christ is the very 
Son of God, and it inferreth the certainty of all his words, and 
enforceth our own religion.” 


That foreign Protestants have not thought it 
necessary to accept the doctrine of mechanical verbal 
inspiration, may be seen from the words of Neander, 
than whom no man has been held in higher honour 
by the Protestant churches of Germany, France, 
Holland, and America :— 


It must be regarded as one of the greatest boons which 
the purifying process of Protestant theology in Germany 
has conferred upon faith as well as science, that the old, 
mechanical view of Inspiration has been so generally aban- 
doned. ‘That doctrine, and the forced harmonies to which 
it led, demanded a clerk-like accuracy in the evangelical 
accounts, and could not admit even the slightest contradic- 
tions in them; but we are now no more compelled to have 
recourse to subtilties against which our sense of truth rebels. 
In studying the historical connexion of our Saviour’s life 
and actions by the application of an unfettered criticism, we 
reach a deeper sense in many of his sayings than the bonds 
of the old dogmatism would have allowed. The inquiring 


2 Catechising of Families, cap. vi. question 11, answer. Practical 
Works, 1830, vol. xix. p. 32. 


LECTURE III. 161 


reason need no longer find its free sense of truth opposed to 
faith ; nor is reason bound to subjugate herself, not to faith, 
but to arbitrary dogmas and artificial hypotheses.* 


But it would be to no purpose to multiply quota- 
tions to establish the view which the Church in all 
her history has held as to the facts of the reception of 
the Fourth Gospel, or the principles on which that 
reception has been based. We have now examined 
both the facts and the principles, not indeed with 
any degree of fulness in proportion to the subject, 
but still with such enlargement as is possible under 
present circumstances. At the risk of the objection 
Quis negavit, Quis dubitavit? rising to many lips, I 
have ventured to extend our instances over a large 
area of known facts ; and I now submit that they all 
converge to the induction that, with the possible 
exception of the Alogi,—and this exception we saw 
to be really unimportant, and to be such as it is in 
favour of the tradition of time and place and therefore 
to support the induction,—there has been no decade 
of any century of the Church’s history, from the 
end of the second down to the end of the eigh- 
teenth century, in which the undisputed acceptance 
of the Fourth Gospel in the Church cannot be traced. 
Catholics— Anglican, Roman, and Greek ; Protestants 
—Lutheran, Reformed, Nonconforming ; tradition of 
the Church, consciousness of the individual, history, 


5 Leben Jesu Christi, ed. 4, * For extension of this induc- 
1845, pp. 12, 13. Eng. Trans. tion to the second century, cf. 
1851, pp. 8, 9. Lecture II. pp. 102 sq. 


M 


Result of 
the ‘judg- 
ment of 
centuries.’ 


Compre- 
hension 
exempli- 
fied in 
width 

of induc- 
tion. 


Depth of 
convic- 
tion. 


Examples: 


The 
Venerable 
Bede, 


162 LECTURE III. 


criticism, the practical test of use and effect in Chris- 
tendom during these hundreds of years all utter one 
voice. Ask whom you will, examine on what prin- 
ciple you will. Here is a result in which all agree. 
The Fourth Gospel is an Apostolic and sacred 
work, coming to us from δ. John, in the fullest 
sense inspired, that is, inspired in the essence’ of its 
inner realities, but not in the accident of its external 
form—though some, with zeal which has outrun 
wisdom or knowledge, have claimed even this—and 
taking the very first place, if first place there be, 
among the Scriptures of the New Testament. 


I have invited your attention to the width of the 
area of instances on which this induction is based. 
Let me close this lecture by asking you to consider 
in two instances the intensity of devotion to the 
Fourth Gospel and of conviction of its Apostolic 
authorship. 

In the eighth century, the Monastery of Jarrow 
on the banks of the Tyne was one of the intellectual 
lights of Europe, and Bada was the pride of England 
and one of the foremost scholars of Christendom. 
He died in the year A.D. 735. This is the closing 
scene of his earthly life :— 

Two weeks before the Easter of 735 the old man was 
seized with an extreme weakness and loss of breath. He 
still preserved however his usual pleasantness and gay good- 
humour, and in spite of prolonged sleeplessness continued 


his lectures to the pupils about him. Verses of his own 
English tongue broke from time to time from the master’s 


LECTURE III. 163 


lip—rude rimes that told how before the “ need-fare,’ Death’s 
stern ‘must go,’ none can enough bethink him what is to be 
his doom for good or ill. The tears of Beeda’s scholars 
mingled with his song. ‘ We never read without weeping,’ 
writes one of them. So the days rolled on to Ascension-tide, 
and still master and pupils toiled at their work, for Bada 
longed to bring to an end his version of St. John’s Gospel 
into the English tongue and his extracts from Bishop Isidore. 
‘I don’t want my boys to read a lie,’ he answered those 
who would have had him rest, ‘ or to work to no purpose after 
I am gone.’ A few days before Ascension-tide his sickness 
grew upon him, but he spent the whole day in teaching, only 
saying cheerfully to his scholars, ‘ Learn with what speed you 
may; I know not how long I may last.’ The dawn broke on 
another sleepless night, and again the old man called his 
scholars round him and bade them write. ‘There is still a 
chapter wanting, said the scribe, as the morning drew on, 
‘and it is hard for thee to question thyself any longer.’ ‘It 
is easily done,’ said Beeda; ‘ take thy pen and write quickly.’ 
Amid tears and farewells the day wore on to eventide. 
‘There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear master,’ said the 
boy. ‘Write it quickly, bade the dying man. ‘It is 
finished now,’ said the little scribe at last. ‘ You speak 
truth,’ said the master ; ‘all is finished now.’ Placed upon 
the pavement, his head supported in his scholars’ arms, his 
face turned to the spot where he was wont to pray, Bada 
chanted the solemn ‘Glory to God.’ As his voice reached the 
close of his song he passed quietly away.° 


In the ninth decade of the nineteenth century— 
the incident is rather later in time than the logical 
fitness of our subject requires, but the parallel will 
justify its use as an illustration—in the castle of Auck- 


> Green, History of the English rabilis Bede; Bede’s Works, ed. 
people, 1878, i. 66 sq. Cf. Giles, 1. clxiii-clxvi. 
Cuthberti Hpistola de Olitw Vene- 


Bishop 
Lightfoot. 


164 LECTURE III. 


land on the banks of the Wear, lived a scholar bishop 
of the English Church. Bishop of a populous diocese 
and administering it as if he lived for the diocese 
alone, he was, at the same time, a scholar like Beda, 
surrounded by pupils loving and beloved, and living 
the humble student’s devoted life. In the autumn of 
1888, he lay sick, and, in the opinion of all who saw 
him and of himself, the sickness was unto death. He 
had long been urged by ‘strangers and friends in 
England and America alike’ to collect and reprint a 
series of essays which are grouped around the Fourth 
Gospel as a centre. But he had hoped to extend 
the series, and had always declined the request. And 
now, to use his own words, ‘ when I was prostrated 
by sickness and my life was hanging on a slender 
thread, it became necessary to give a final answer.’ 
His pupil and chaplain filled the office of the boy at 
Beeda’s hand. [rom the very presence of death his 
testimony on the external evidence of the Fourth 
Gospel was given to the world. 

It pleased God for a time to restore him to some 
measure of strength. Hours of weakness which 
as we thought ought to have been claimed for rest 
were devoted to work. ‘It is hard for thee to ques- 
tion thyself any longer,’ said those around him. ‘It 
is easily done,’ was the constant reply. The late 
autumn of 1889 found him again obliged to leave 
his northern home. The last days were in part occu- 
pied by revising, as the hands of his chaplain copied, 


° Essays on Supernatural Religion, 1889, preface, p. vii. 


LECTURE ΗΠ’ 165 


a lecture upon the /nternal Evidence for the Authen- 
ticity and Crenuineness of St. John’s Gospel delivered 
eighteen years before, and now to be re-delivered 
with the weight of all these years of thought. ‘ His 
sickness grew upon him.’ On the festival of 5. 
Thomas he fell on sleep. On the eve of S. John 
the Evangelist’s day his remains rested beneath the 
same roof with those of Cuthbert and Bede, on the 
festival of S. John they were committed to their 
resting-place in the chapel at Auckland. The lecture 
on Ὁ. John was the last public document to which 
he affixed his name, and it was given to the world 
from the open grave. He being dead yet speaketh. 
Let us hear him :— 


Whatever consequences may follow from it, we are com- 
pelled on critical grounds to accept this Fourth Gospel as 
the genuine work of John the son of Zebedee. ... As a 
critical question, | wish to take a verdict upon it. But as 
I could not have you think that I am blind to the theological 
issues directly or indirectly connected with it, I will close 
with this brief confession of faith. I believe from my heart 
that the truth which this Gospel more especially enshrines— 
the truth that Jesus Christ is the very Word incarnate, the 
manifestation of the Father to mankind—is the one lesson 
which, duly apprehended, will do more than all our feeble 
efforts to purify and elevate human life here, by imparting to 
it hope and light and strength, the one study which alone 
can fitly prepare us for a joyful immortality hereafter.’ 


Such, in all the width of a comprehension, in all 
the depth of an mtension, which I am able simply to 


7 Expositor, March 1890, p. 188. 


166 LECTURE III. 


indicate, is the ‘judgment of centuries’ upon the 
Fourth Gospel. 


Next term we will inquire into the judgments 
of ‘our age’ and consider how far they have can- 
celled it. | 


LECTURE IV 


‘OUR AGE’ 


EVANSON. BRETSCHNEIDER. STRAUSS 


“WITHOUT DOUBT HUMAN TESTIMONY IS TO BE DULY AND STRICTLY SIFTED, 
AND EVERY DEFECT IN ITS QUANTITY OR QUALITY IS TO BE RECORDED IN 
THE SHAPE OF A DEDUCTION FROM ITS WEIGHT. BUT AS THERE IS NO PRO- 
CEEDING MORE IRREVERENT, SO THERE IS NONE MORE STRICTLY IRRATIONAL, 
THAN ITS WHOLESALE DEPRECIATION. SUCH DEPRECIATION IS AN INFALLIBLE 
NOTE OF SHALLOW AND CARELESS THINKING, FOR IT VERY GENERALLY IM- 
PLIES AN EXAGGERATED AND ALMOST LUDICROUS ESTIMATE OF THE CAPACITY 
AND PERFORMANCES OF THE PRESENT GENERATION, AS COMPARED WITH 
THOSE WHICH HAVE PRECEDED IT.’ 


Gladstone. 


LECTURE IV. 


Is there a thing whereof men say, See, this is new ? it hath been already, 
in the ages which were before us.—Kccles. i. 10. 


In the earlier lectures of this course we have endea- 
voured to estimate the ‘judgment of centuries’ on 
the authorship of the Fourth Gospel. It remains for 
us to consider the criticism of ‘ our age,’ which is said 
to have cancelled it. That it should be so cancelled 
is a priori not impossible, but if the facts and the 
arguments to which 1 have invited your attention 
have any real force, it is in a high degree improbable. 
The convictions of the past may be wholly wrong; but 
we are bound to demand proof of this, and those who 
assert it have no right to feel aggrieved, if strength 
and frequency of assertion are not accepted in the 
place of proof. Still less have they any right to feel 
agerieved if, when some among them condescend to 
personal attack upon their opponents, the opinion of 
bystanders should be, in accord with the legal maxim, 
that they have no case. If ‘our age’ has come to 
the knowledge of new facts, let them be adduced. If 
new inductions from old facts have been established, 
let the inductions and the processes by which they 
have been arrived at, be stated. It will not produce 
conviction to tell us in general terms that all this 


Criticism 
of ‘our 
age.’ 


Assertion 
cannot be 
accepted 
as proof, 


170 LECTURE IV. 


vast revolution has been accomplished, and that we 
must therefore accept the new position. We have 
lately read, to take an example of such statements, 
the following words :— 


He paused, and then very simply, and so as to be understood 
by those who heard him, he gave a rapid sketch of that great 
operation worked by the best intellect of Europe during the 
last half century— broadly speaking—on the facts and docu- 
ments of primitive Christianity. From all sides and by the 
help of every conceivable instrument those facts have been 
investigated, and now at last the great result—‘ the revivified, 
reconceived truth—seems ready to emerge ἢ] 


Now, we must necessarily inquire before we 
accept this assertion, ‘On what array of facts is the 
generalization made?’ And if we are held in a 
momentary spell and are tempted to yield our 
weaker judgment to one who can speak confi- 
dently of the fifty years’ work of the best intellect 
of Europe, and of the facts and documents of 
primitive Christianity, and of investigations by every 
conceivable instrument, the spell is soon broken 
when we remember that the assertion is made by 
a fictitious personage who represents a weak and 
certainly ill-informed young clergyman ; and, instead 
of absolute submission, we cannot help asking ‘ What 

nor yet does he know about it ?’ Nor will the mere novelty 
ality. | Which is necessary to an original essay for a young 
doctor’s degree, or for the pages of a Zeitschrift wait- 
ing for the press, ingenious and interesting though it 


* Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere, iii. p. 206. 


LECTURE IV. 1171 


often is, be as convincing to all readers as it is to the 
author. Originality may prove the cleverness of a 
writer, but it may also take from the force of his 
writing. The man who attempts to prove that history 
has all through been a mistake, and the instincts of 
humanity a delusion ; and expects that the one should 
be rewritten, and the other abandoned, in conformity 
with his own original essay, must not be surprised if | 
other men do not all at once agree with him. Perhaps 
they will come to do so; but some of them have 
read a good many such essays, and still have not been 
led to abandon the opinion that the world is wiser 
than any one man in it. Time may be naturally 
asked for in which to test his results, and meanwhile 
the crop of original essays is not likely to cease, and 
if he share the fate of his predecessors he may aban- 
don the views which now seem so certain, or his 
own originality may be eclipsed by something more 
original still. The child has often stood upon its 
father’s shoulders and has seemed to itself—but only 
to itself—taller than the man upon whose strength it 
rested. And Time’s youngest child of the nineteenth 
century may seem to itself—but only to itself—taller 
than the great past on which it rests. Adults who 
stand and watch will smile, for Time’s children have 
had a habit of thinking this in every age ;” and after 


of the state of that science a 
hundred years ago, just before 


2 Examples of this abound on 
all sides. One which is of special 


interest from its connexion with 
biblical criticism, is found in the 
opinion which Michaelis formed 


the dawn of ‘ our age’ :— 
‘Whenever I reflect on the 
year 1750, when the first edition 


Destruc- 
tive criti- 
cism 


LECTURE IV. 


all individual men do not grow to be so much taller 
in the nineteenth century than they were in the first. 


Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona 
Multi ; sed omnes illacrymabiles 
Urgentur ignotique longa 
Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.* 


Nor will the positive results of the ‘judgment of 
centuries’ be cancelled by any criticism which [5 


of this Introduction appeared, 
which I published at that time 
chiefly as a guide for my academi- 
cal lectures, and compare it with 
the more complete editions of 
1765, and 1777, I feel a satisfac- 
tion, and even a degree of as- 
tonishment, at the progress of 
learning in the present age: and 
as during the last ten years in 
particular the most rapid advances 
have been made in literature, 
the present edition of this work, 
which is a kind of general re- 
pository, has received a propor- 
tional increase. I candidly con- 
fess, not only that my own private 
knowledge at the time of my first 
publication was inferior to what 
it should and might have been, 
but that the performance itself 
was written in too much haste: 
and yet this very imperfect edition 
had the honour of being translated 
into English, and of undergoing a 
re-impression even at the time 
when the second much more com- 
plete edition was already published 
in Germany. The republic of 
letters is at present in possession 
of knowledge, of which it had no 


idea in the middle of this century ; 
and I may venture to affirm, that 
the last-mentioned period bears 
the same analogy to the year 1787, 
as the state of infancy to that of 
manhood. We were unable at 
that time to form an adequate 
judgement on many important 
topics, and the opinions of the 
learned were divided on the most 
ancient and most valuable manu- 
BCLIDtS: +... 

‘The system of biblical criticism 
has been placed in a new light, 
and reduced to a state of greater 
certainty: but it is unnecessary 
to swell the preface with a de- 
scription of the treasures that 
have been opened, and the dis- 
coveries that have been made in 
this enlightened age, as they are 
arranged under their respective 
heads in the course of the present 
Introduction.’ John David Mi- 
chaelis’ Introduction to the New 
Testament, Eng. Trans. by Herbert 
Marsh, 1793, vol. i. pt. 1; Preface 
to German original of ed. 4, 
quoted in Preface, pp. iii, iv. 

3 Hor. Carm. iv. 9. 25. 


LECTURE IV. dies: 


merely negative and destructive. There are cer- 
tain broad facts of human life and history to be 
accounted for. If a man says, ‘ You are all mis- 
taken. You are all like children in the nursery. 
Believe me, for I have attained to adult knowledge, 
and know what I am talking about; if you could 
only see your delusion as 1 see it from the higher 
platform on which I stand, you would abandon it in 
a moment. It is really absurd for people in this 
nineteenth century to be living in mud huts con- 
structed without any knowledge of the elementary 
principles of architecture’—he must not be sur- 
prised if he finds that there is a prejudice in favour 
of general fact and in opposition to individual 
fancy. Nor must he be surprised if he is asked to 
show that his fuller knowledge provides not only a 
theory, but a practical working rule by which the 
past may be measured and the present be lived ; and 
if ordinary men ask leave to remain in the mud 
huts of their present ignorance until the house 
which he would build for them has got a little 
beyond the plans. 

If, then, ‘ our age’ is to cancel the ‘judgment of 
centuries,’ it must be by the destructive criticism of 
clear, consistent, measured proof that this judgment 
is wrong ; and by the constructive criticism of a defi- 
nite, established judgment, which it is prepared to 
substitute for that which it would destroy. How 
far has it hitherto succeeded in this double task with 
regard to the Fourth Gospel ? 


not 
sufficient ; 


construc- 
tion de- 
manded. 


Evanson, 
1731- 
1805. 


The Dis- 
sonance. 


The 
author. 


The work, 


174 LECTURE IV. 


It has been customary to date the commencement 
of the destructive criticism of the Fourth Gospel from 
the appearance of a small work on The Dissonance of 
the Evangelists, by Edward Evanson, which was pub- 
lished in 1792.4. The work consists of two hundred 
and eighty-nine small octavo pages, of which thirty- 
three are devoted to ὃ. John, and deal with the usu- 
ally alleged discrepancies between this Gospel and 
one or more of the other three, especially that accord- 
ing to ὃ. Luke. The author’s previous career was 
scarcely such as to qualify him for the task which he 
undertook, though he himself thought that it was. He 
had for reasons not connected with the present ques- 
tion, resigned his position as a clergyman in 1778, and 
trusts his mind has been perfectly unbiassed and impartial 
in its investigations ; | 
because he had been 


unconnected for above fifteen years with any religious sect 
or party whatsoever, disdaining the office of a teacher of so 
plain a thing as Christianity, considered as a lucrative occu- 
pation, and too far advanced in life to have any temporal 
interest in view.° 


He admits the authenticity of S. Luke and of the 
Acts of the Apostles in terms which must sound 
strange to some of his successors :— 

We have here, then, every kind of evidence, whereof the 


nature of the case admits, to convince us of the genuine 


4 The Dissonance of the Four ward Evanson, A.M., Ipswich. 
yenerally received Evangelists, aud = MDCCXCII. 
the Evidence of their respective ° Ibid. Preface, p. ix. 
Authenticity examined. By Ed- 


LECTURE IV. 17d 


authenticity and veracity of both these histories ; and with 
these, for my own part, I am abundantly satisfied.® 


On the other hand, he had long been induced 


to reject three of the four generally received Gospels, as 
spurious fictions of the second century, unnecessary and even 
prejudicial to the cause of true christianity, and in every 
respect unworthy of the regard which so many ages have paid 
to them.’ 


This preference for $. Luke is the more remarkable, 
as in the author’s opinion 


Prophecy is by far the most satisfactory and the only lasting, 
supernatural evidence of the truth of any Revelation.® 


Of the author’s critical discrimination you will form 
a sufficient opinion from the following sentence :— 


I think it my duty to add briefly my reasons for expunging 
also out of the volume of duly authenticated scriptures of the 
New Covenant, the Epistles, to the Romans—to the Ephesians 
—to the Colossians—to the Hebrews—of James—of Peter— 
of John—of Jude,—and, in the book of the Revelation, the 
Epistles to the seven churches of Asia.? 


Of the cogency of the reasons for rejecting the Epistle 
to the Romans, which, as far as 1 know, no modern 
critic in England or Germany rejects, and as a final 
example of the author’s critical powers, let us take 
the following comment on the salutation to ‘ Rufus 
chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine’ :—" 

δ Dissonance, wt supra, p. 111. ® Ibid. p. 256. 


7 Ibid. p. 255. 1, Rom. xvi. 13. 
5 toed. p: 6. 


unworthy 
of the 
subject. 


The 
replies. 


176 LECTURE IV. 


And if there is any reason to believe that St. Paul’s 
mother was then living, is it credible, that an old woman 
of Tarsus in Cilicia, whose son was so wonderfully appointed 
to preach the Gospel, and who was occupied in that com- 
mission in Asia and Greece, should leave her native country 
and such a son, and ramble after other preachers of the 
Gospel, at so advanced an age, to the far distant metropolis 


of Italy ?2 


The whole work is indeed quite unworthy of its 
subject, and would be unworthy of your attention 
were it not for the conspicuous position which has 
been assigned to it. There is some difficulty in 
avoiding the suspicion that it has been referred to 
and quoted much more frequently than it has been 
seen or read. It is now rare, and, except as a name 
with which to head a list, has passed into merited 
oblivion ; but it caused no small stir when it was 
published. 

Several answers at once appeared, among them 
one by Dr. Joseph Priestley,’ the well-known Unita- 
A 


rian minister, and one by 


2 Dissonance, ut supra, p. 260. 

3 [Tetters to a Young Man, 
part ii., 1793. 

4 An Essay on the Authenticity 
of the New Testament (1793). As 
an example of the state of biblical 
knowledge in the last century, 
which isimportant to us as account- 
ing for the spread of the opinions 
of the English Deists and others, 
it may be noted that when Mr. 
Simpson, who had completed his 
course at one of the best classical 
schools in the country, and at St. 


Mr. David Simpson.* 


John’s College, Cambridge, and 
taken his degree, became a can- 
didate for the ministry, he did not 
possess a Bible, and that when he 
bought one he hid it from his 
friends lest he should ‘incur the 
imputation of Methodism.’ Me- 
moir of the Author by Edward 
Parsons, pp. vi, vii, in Simpson’s 
Plea for the Deity of Jesus, 1812. 

The above is an example from 
Yorkshire. It may be interesting 
to supplement it by one from 
Somerset which is furnished by 


LECTURE IV. Lei 


second and posthumous edition of Evanson’s work 
appeared in 1805, and certain principles in it were 
discussed in the Bampton Lectures of 1810, and the 
Lecturer gives in his preface some facts about the 
book for an ‘obscure student of the history of re- 
ligious controversies.’ ἢ 


The battle was soon shifted from English to 
German ground. The opening years of the nineteenth 
century were in Germany fruitful alike in literature, 
criticism, patriotism, philosophy, religion. Fichte at 
Jena, and later at Berlin, Jacobi at Munich, were in the 
fulness of their power, and Schelling was foreshadow- 
ing his still greater influence. The Romanticists, 
Herder, Novalis (Hardenberg), La Motte Fouqué, 
Schlegel, were modifying the currents of cultured 
thought.’ The University of Berlin was founded in 
1810, when Halle had become subject to France, and 


the following letter from Miss H. c.,’ examined in Hight Discourses 
More to Mr. Wilberforce, in preached in 1810. Thomas Fal- 
which she describes her work in coner, Bampton Lectures. Ox- 
Cheddar: ‘We found more than ford, 1811. Appendix, 1822. Pre- 
two thousand people inthe parish, _ face, p. v. 
almost all very poor. ... We ° See the interesting chapters 
went to every house in the place, on the influence of these writers 
and found each a scene of the in Hagenbach’s History of the 
greatest ignorance and vice. We Church im the 18th and 19th 
saw but one Bibleinallthe parish, Centuries. Eng. Trans. by Dr. 
and that was used to propaflower- Hurst, New York, 1869, vol. ii. 
pot.’ Roberts, Memoirs of the Cf. Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der 
Life and Correspondence of Mrs.  neuesten Theologie, pp. 3 sqq. ; 
Hannah More, ed. 3, 1835, vol. Gervinus, Nationalliteratur, vol.v. 
li. pp. 295-96. p- 600 ; and esp. Baur, Geschichte 
> Certain Principles in Evan- der christlichen Kirche, Bd. iv. 
sow’s ‘Dissonance of the Evangelists,  2te Aufl. pp. 55-60. 


N 


German 
influences. 


Bearing 
of these 
years on 
the 
Gospels.’ 


178 LECTURE IV. 


numbered among its first teachers Schleiermacher, 
Neander, and De Wette. Three years later the 
students were singing in every street Korner’s songs, 
which both expressed and roused a patriotism that 
defied Napoleon’s invading power, and became the 
spirit of the united fatherland. The peace brought by 
its side the tercentenary of Luther and the Reforma- 
tion, and while some men hoped and some men feared 
that a new reformation lay before them in the not- 
distant future, the nation, fresh from the throes of its 
mighty struggle, was baptized anew into the spiritual 
realities of the great Reformation of the past. 

These years were naturally not without their direct 
bearing on the question of the Gospels. The literary 
catalogues of the period contain references to a large 
number of books and articles upon our own part of 
the subject, among which Herder’s Son of God, 
Saviour of the World,’ the Commentary of Paulus,® 
the Introductions of Hug,? and Eichhorn,’ and 
Schmidt,’ the discussion of Justin’s quotations 
by Winer,’ are the most important. The leading 
idea of writers who admitted the dissonance of the 
Evangelists was that the Fourth Gospel was to be 
maintained, even if this involved the sacrifice of the 

7 Herder, J. G., Von Gottes ' Hichhorn, J. G., Hinleitung 
Sohn der Welt Heiland, 1797. in das Neue Testament, 1810. 

8 Paulus, H. E. G., Commen- 3. Schmidt, J. E. C., Histo- 
tar iiber das Neue Testament, iv.  risch-kritische Einleitung ins Neue 
Theil, 16 Abth., 106 Halfte,1812. Testament, 1804. 

° Hug, J. L., Hinleitung in die 3 Winer, G. B., Justinwm 


Schriften des Neuen Testaments,ed. Martyremevangeliiscanonicisusum 
1, 1808. Suisse ostenditur, 1819. 


LECTURE Iv. 179 


others. But if we pass over the period without a 
more detailed notice, we shall find justification for 
doing so in the general acceptance of the opinion 
which Strauss and others express, that Bretschneider 
is the first writer who deals with the Johannine 
question in a way which is worthy of modern 
scientific requirements ;* and that it is from his date 
that the inquiry becomes one of first importance. 

Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider was the son of a 
country pastor in Saxony. He was educated at 
Leipzig, and having scruples about entering the 
ministry, for which he had been intended, he de- 
voted himself for some years to literary and tutorial 
work. He was afterwards ordained, and in 1816 
became general superintendent at Gotha. He filled 
this office, and was practically head of the church in 
the dukedom, until his death in 1848. His principal 
earlier works are two dogmatic treatises, which derive 
special value from the author’s historical investiga- 
tions ; and from the calm, sober-minded independence, 
that refused to sacrifice theology to rationalism on the 
one hand, or to mysticism on the other. He after- 
wards more openly opposed the newer teaching of 
Schleiermacher, Marheineke, and Hase. In earlier life 
he had also written upon the LX X. and Apocrypha, 
and his scholarship was further attested by the more 
mature, and perhaps best known of his books, the 
Lexicon to the New Testament.’ 


* Cf. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu > Lexicon manuale Greco-lati- 
fiir das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, num in libros N. T., 1829. 
1864, pp. 90 sq. 


w 2 


Bret- 
schneider, 
1770 
1848. 


Life and 


earlier 
works. 


The Pro- 
babilia: 


its pur- 
pose, 


and scope. 


180 LECTURE Iv. 


In 1820 Bretschneider published at Leipzig his 
work on the Probabilities concerning the Nature and 
Origin of the Gospel and Epistles of the Apostle John.® 
It was originally written in German, and this accounts 
for the form of some of the sentences ; but it was 
published in Latin, for it was not intended for general 
reading, and the conclusions which the writer suggests 


tentatively, and submits to the opinions of experts, 


are put forward only as Probabilities. He expresses 
this in the following terms :— 


But we ask you, kind reader, to believe that whatever con- 
clusions we have come to, we do not regard them as the utter- 
ances of an oracle, but as things which seem probable after 
discussion. It is not that in our opinion the Gospel of John 
is spurious, but only that it seems to be so, though we should 
have preferred to write is more frequently instead of, for the 
thousandth time, repeating seems. For we expect, nay, we 
hope, that the result will be that experts in criticism will 
teach us better wherever we may have made mistakes, and we 
will accept their corrections most willingly. For we adopt 
the words of Cicero’ as our own :— 

‘T will explain these things as far as I can, but you must 
not regard what I say as certain and fixed, as if it were said 
by the Pythian Apollo; but as said by one frail mortal among 
many following out probabilities by the help of conjecture. 
For my part, I cannot go further than to trace resemblances 
to truth. Let those talk about certainties who say, on the 
one hand, that they can be perceived, and profess on the 
other that they themselves are wise.’ ὃ 


The author excuses himself from. writing a his- 


tory of the contemporary discussion of the question 


® Probabilia de Evangelit et 7 Tusc. Queest. i. 8. 
Epistolarum Joannis, Apostoli, in- 8 Probabilia, ut supra, Preface, 
dole et origine, 1820. p. Vill. 


LECTURE IV. 181 


—though he had read most of the writings on either 
side, and gives a list of them here and in the second 
edition of his Systematic Exposition of Dogmatic Con- 
ceptions,” which had been published a year before—on 
the ground that he wishes to keep his book within 
due limits, that it was necessary to deal with the 
more important issues only, and that the establish- 
ment of truth would be in itself the refutation of 
error.! The book is accordingly a small one, con- 
taining only 224 octavo pages, but it consists of a 
series of important propositions, and there are few 
arguments of any value in the voluminous literature 
of the later discussions, the germ of which may not be 
found here. 
The first question which he examines is, 


Whether the Fourth Gospel is worthy of credit in its 
reports of the discourses of Jesus, and whether it is more 
worthy of credit than the earlier Gospels.? 


And the conclusion to which he comes is— 


We seem not to be far from the truth when we determine 
that the discussions between Jesus, the disciples, the Jews 
and the Baptist are not real, but are, at all events, to a very 
great extent imaginary, and that the author of the Gospel 
was not a companion of Jesus, nor a hearer of his teaching ; 
and this opinion is strongly confirmed by the fact that cir- 
cumstances can be shown to have existed in the state of 
Christianity in the second century which account for the 
writer's presentation of these discussions between Jesus and 


® Systematische Entwickelung al- 1 Probabilia, ut supra, Preface, 
ler in der Dogmatik vorkommenden  p. vii. 
Begriffe, 2 ed., 1819. 2 Ibid. cap. i. ad init. p. 1. 


The Jo- 
hannine 
discourses, 


largely 
imaginary. 


The 
author 
not the 
Apostle, 


nor a 
Palestin- 
lan, 


nora Jew. 


Gospel 
sprung 
from 


182 LECTURE IV. 


his adversaries. ‘This is discussed more fully in a subsequent 
chapter.? 


He next proceeds to give reasons for the pro- 
position— 
that it was neither the Apostle John nor any other com- 
panion of Jesus who had himself seen and heard all things 


who composed the Gospel, but a man who lived later, and 
used traditions written or unwritten.‘ 


The third point to be established is— 


that it is probable that the author of the Gospel was neither 
a Palestinian nor a Jew;° 


and this is shown by the dogmatic expressions ;° by 
forms of speech which a born Jew would not have 
used ;‘ by the way in which the writer makes 
himself prominent in the Gospel, and his anxiety 
to establish his own trustworthiness ; ὃ by the illus- 
trations of Jewish matters in which the author has 
made serious mistakes all through ;’ and, lastly, by 
the author’s special error about the Paschal supper. 

When Bretschneider comes to the task of con- 
struction, from which he does not shrink, he finds a 
point of departure in the statement of Justin that the 
Jews sent chosen men from Jerusalem through the 
whole world to denounce the godless heresy of the 
Christians,” and that there sprung up in the begin- 


8 Probabilia, ut swpra, cap. 111. 7 Ibid. pp. 91-92. 
ad fin. p. 64. 8 Ibid. pp. 110-113. 
4 Ibid. cap. ii. ad init. p. 65, ° sbid. pp. 92-100. 
ad fin. p. 82. ' Ibid. pp. 100-110. 
5. Ibid. cap. 111. ad init. p. 83. ? Dial. c. Tryph. pp. 234 and 


ὁ Ibid. pp. 83-90. 335. Ibid. p. 115. 


LECTURE IV. 183 


ning and middle of the second century an apologe- 
tic zeal among Christians which could have had no 
place until it was excited. The Fourth Gospel, with 
its obviously apologetic and polemic purpose, is the 
result. This accounts for the form of dialogue, for 
the dogmatic argument, for the anti-Jewish rigour, 
for the choice of material, for the omissions. This 
explains the frequent opposition of Jesus to ‘ the 
Jews’ as distinguished from ‘the people’ or ‘ the 
multitude’; the discussions; the want of sense on 
the part of the Jews, who constantly pervert the 
meaning of Jesus, for the second-century writer is 
depicting the Jews of his own day; the disputes 
about dogmas, which were not matters of controversy 
between Jesus and the Pharisees of his time, but 
were discussed between Christians and Jews in the 
second century.” 

It explains also, as he thinks, the choice of miracles, 
and specially the absence of all cases of possession ; * 
the absence of precepts and parables, and the presence 
of discourses and a hidden gnosis ;° the presentation 
of a life of Jesus which is the reflection of the Logos.° 
And this, lastly, sheds light on individual passages of 
the Gospel.’ 

The author then proceeds to ask whether the 
authority of the Gospel can be established from the 
Apocalypse, and finds, after a criticism of the views of 


3 Probabilia, ut supra, pp. 116-119. δ Ihnd. pp. 125-129. 
4 Ibid. pp. 119-123. 7 Ibid. pp. 129-149. 
5. Ibid. pp. 123-125. 


Jewish 
anti- 
Christian 
zeal, 


cannot be 
supported 
from 


the 
Apoca- 
lypse, 


nor from 
Epistles. 


The 
Epistles 
them- 
selves not 
proved to 
be Johan- 
nine, 


184 LECTURE IV. 


Eichhorn and Bertholdt, that even if it could be proved 
that the Apocalypse was by the Apostle John, which 
he regards as very doubtful, that would not strengthen 
the argument for the authorship of the Gospel—nay, 
it would, by reason of the manifest difference of the 
books, weaken it.® 

Can it be established from the Epistles? The 
argument based upon grammar and diction which 
Bertholdt adopts from Schulze is valid; if the 
Epistles were written by the Apostle John, it follows 
that the Gospel proceeded from the same author. 
But the argument can be inverted with equal validity ; 
if the Gospel was not written by the Apostle John, it 
follows that the Epistles cannot be ascribed to him. 
Further, the Epistles, as the shorter and less deve- 
loped writings, and as writings in which the author 
is less prominent, must depend upon the Gospel, not 
the Gospel upon the Epistles. . They nowhere claim 
to be by S. John, and contain things which rather 
suggest that they are not ; nor is there sufficient ex- 
ternal testimony to establish the Epistles themselves, 
much less to establish the Gospel by their means.’ 
Bertholdt’s arguments are, in his opinion, conclusive 
as against Lange and Cludius, who had lately ques- 
tioned the authorship of the First Epistle, but they 
will not bear all that the writer seeks to prove by them. 
Identity of authorship is not necessarily Johannine 
authorship. There is no proof that the Epistle be- 
longed to the first century, or that the Apostles were 


® Probabilia, ut supra, pp. 150-161. 5. Ibid. pp. 161-164. 


LECTURE IV. 185 


ever known as presbyters, or that the Apostle John 
was on account of extreme old age called ‘ presbyter ’ 
in a special sense. When the testimony of Papias, and 
Polycarp, and Ireneus is examined, it is not found to 
be sufficient. There is really nothing in the Epistles 
which proves that they were by the Apostle John, 
and there is nothing to prevent our gathering from 
the Gospel that the Epistles also are not genuine. 
On the other hand, the Epistles tend to strengthen 
the opinion that the Gospel could not have been 
written by 8. John.’ 

Bretschneider then proceeds to deal with the ex- 
The most ancient witnesses who 
are thought to have affirmed the authenticity of the 
Gospel—let them be heard, and their authority 
tested. The nature of the testimony is to be 
considered. There is no perfect—that is, clear and 
express—testimony to the Johannine authorship 
in the second century until its close, when we have 
it in Theophilus of Antioch, certain Valentinians, 
and Ireneus.? The testimony of the church at 
Ephesus ;* of Barnabas, of Polycarp, of Ignatius, of 
the First Epistle of Clement of Rome ; of the doubtful 
Recognitions ; of the Homilies ;* of the Sibylline 
Oracles ;° of Justin Martyr and Tatian ; ° of Celsus,’ 
of Hermas, of the Book of Henoch, of the testimony 
of the Twelve Patriarchs, of the Acts of Pilate, of the 


ternal evidences. 


1 Probabilia, ut supra, pp. 165-177. 
2 Ibid. pp. 178-181. 
5. Ibid. pp. 182-183. 
4 Ibid. pp. 184-188. 


ὅ Ibid. pp. 189-190. 
δ Ibid. pp. 191-194. 
7 Ibid. pp. 195-199. 


and 
strength- 
en adverse 
views 
about 
Gospel. 


The 
external 
evidences 
not 
sufficient. 


Weight of 


opposing 
internal 
evidence. 


Place 
probably 
Egypt. 


Summary. 


186 LECTURE IV. 


Gospel of Nicodemus, of the Gospel to the Hebrews ; ὃ 
of the Montanists ;° of Valentinus and the Valen- 
tinians ; of Heracleon ; ' of Irenzus ;" of Theophilus of 
Antioch ;? are tested : and the conclusion is deduced 
that the external evidences are not sufficient in weight 
or antiquity or number to prove the authenticity of 
the Gospel ; much less, therefore, do they prevent our 
concluding that the Gospel was not written by John 
—a conclusion which so many and so great internal 
arguments commend. Nor would the conclusion be 
different if we had external evidences, more and 
weightier than we have ; for while internal evidence 
is of first importance in all works of very great 
antiquity, it is specially so in Christian writings, on 
account of the many fictitious books which were 
accepted by the credulous negligence of the first ages.* 

As regards the place from which the Fourth Gospel 
sprung, it seems to have been first used by the 
Valentinians in Egypt, and to have been taken by 
them to Rome and thence to Gaul ; and if we suppose 
that at the time the Gospel was taken to Rome it 
came also from the Alexandrians through Theophilus 
to Antioch, and was published in Asia Minor, there 
is no further difficulty from the external evidence. 
The place and person may both be doubtful, but this 
seems certain : that the author was not the Apostle 
John, nor a companion of Jesus, nor a Christian 


ὃ Probabilia, ut supra, pp. 200-204. 2 Ibid. pp. 214-217. 
° Ibid. pp. 205-211. 3 Ibid. p. 218. 
1 Ibid. pp. 212-213. 4 Ibid. pp. 219-220. 


LECTURE IV. Δ 197 


sprung from or living in Palestine, nor a Jew by 
birth ; but that he was some Christian of Alexandrian 
training, and filling the office of a presbyter, and that 
he made use of tradition and some written document. 
It is most likely that he lived in Egypt, partly from 
the line which he took on the Paschal question, partly 
because his doctrine agreed very largely with Gnos- 
ticism ; and it is probable that the Gnostics first knew 
his Gospel in Egypt, strongly approved of it, took 
it to Rome, and gained general acceptance for it by 
the authority of the Roman church.° 

It is threescore years and ten since these views 
were modestly submitted to the judgments of the 
learned—Eruditorum judiciis modeste subject is part 
of the title—and the case for the negative criticism 
has never been put with more cogency. Subsequent 
writers have been less modest, but also less learned. 
They have alleged some new facts and many new 
fancies. They have filled our book-cases with erudi- 
tion, in the midst of which Bretschneider’s little 
volume has taken a back shelf and has been hidden 
from view; but they have derived from it more than 
they have always known, and the advocate who to- 
day wants a brief from which to plead against the 
Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel will find 
his case stated nowhere so well as here. 

The learned theologians of the time did not receive 
Bretschneider’s work in the spirit in which he sub- 
mitted it to them. Reviews, pamphlets, books assailed 


5 Probabilia, ut supra, pp. 221-224. 


Import- 
ance of 
the book. 


Bret- 

schneider 
convinced 
by replies. 


Definite 
and 
repeated 
retracta- 
tion. 


* Question 
is settled.’ 


188 LECTURE IV. 


him on all sides. He himself tells us that many of 
them were extremely passionate and bitter, and that 
the Minister von Einsiedel publicly denounced him 
as ‘the John-slanderer.’® But, with a patience 
which has not always been manifested in this contro- 
versy, he none the less studied the replies; and at the 
end of two years, when the second edition of his 
Handbook of Dogmatics* was published, he was con- 
vinced that his arguments had been fully answered, 
and frankly withdrew his conclusions. After two 
years’ further thought he took occasion to repeat this 
retractation in a review article.2 Four years later a 
third edition of the Handbook of Dogmatics was pub- 
lished, and the author reprinted part of the preface 
of the second edition which contained the statement 
of his change of view, and also called attention to the 
fact in a note in the body of the work. His book, as 
he tells us in emphatic language, which he took every 
opportunity to repeat, had accomplished its purpose. 
The Probabilities had brought out proofs of the 
authenticity. The question is settled for the theo- 
logical public.’ 


ὁ Autobiography, translated by iAchte Quellen gebraucht, weil 
Professor G. E. Day in Bibliotheca die Zweifel an der Aechtheit 


Sacra, April 1853, p. 259. dieser Schriften, die ich vor 
1 Handbuch der Dogmatik, einiger Zeit dem gelehrten Pub- 
1822. likum vorlegte, von mir selbst nur 


® Tzschirner’s Magazin fiir als Anfragen angesehen worden 
christliche Prediger, 1824, pp. sind, welche die Veranlassung 
153-167. geben méchten, dass der Beweis 
9. “Bei der biblischen Kritik der Aechtheit dieser Schriften, der 
habe ich auch die Johanneischen mir noch unvollkommen schien, 
Schriften ganz unbedenklich 215. griindlicher gefiihrt werde, und 


LECTURE IV. 189 


I do not claim Bretschneider as in himself a 
strong witness in favour of the Johannine authorship, 
though there might be good ground for doing so ; 
but he at least furnishes conclusive evidence that at 
the close of the first generation of this century, de- 
structive criticism had directed its strongest forces 
against the citadel only to be driven back in the at- 
tempt. Strauss tries to minimize the force of Bret- 
schneider’s withdrawal, though he was ready to wel- 
come the danger and violence of the attack, by the 
statement that his general theological position was 
not deep enough to bear all that followed from a 
rejection of the Fourth Gospel; and marvels at the 
prejudice of a man like Schleiermacher, who says that 
he was not moved for a moment by the doubts which 
had been put forward, though it was just as well 
that they had been discussed.! 

But Bretschneider’s true position is revealed in the 
singularly candid posthumous autobiography which 


weil ich nach den dariiber erschie- 
nenen Beurtheilungen und ange- 
kiindigten Schriften wohl hoffen 
darf, diese Absicht véllig erreicht 
zu sehen.’—Preface of 1822. ‘Ich 
sehe jetzt diese Sache fiir das 
theologische Publikum als erle- 
digt an.’—Note to reprint of fore- 
going in ed. 3, 1828, p. viil. 
‘Der Zweck, den meine ‘‘ Pro- 
babilia de Evangelii et episto- 
lar. Joannis apostoli indole et 
origine ” (Lips. 1820. 8.) hatten, 
nimlich die Untersuchung tiber 
die Aechtheit der Johanneischen 


Schriften neu anzuregen, und 
weiter zu fiihren, ist erreicht 
worden, und die aufgestellten 
Zweifel kénnen nun wohl als 
erledigt angesehen werden.’— 
Ibid. p. 268. Repeated and en- 
larged ten years later, ed. 4, 1838, 
vol. i. p. 343. Cf. esp.the explana- 
tion of the Johannine Discourses, 
Ibid. pp. 362 sq. 

1 Strauss, Das Leben Jesu fiir 
das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, 1864. 
Schleiermacher, LHinleitwng, 1]. 
§ 15, pp. 90 sqq. Cf. infra, pp. 
212 sq. 


Bret- 
schnei- 
der’s 


character 
in Auto- 
biography. 


190 LECTURE IV. 


has been published by his son.?, He was before all 
things a man of calm severe reason. He would accept 
no statement which could not be expressed and proved 
as a logical proposition. Nothing was so distasteful to 
him as obscure and unintelligible mystic talk. He 
grew into an attitude of strong and even bitter oppo- 
sition to Schleiermacher and his followers, whom he 
regarded as largely under the influence of Schelling, 
and the attacks in the Lvangelical Church Journal ὃ 
and elsewhere, drove him further and further from 
In 1832 he suc- 


ceeded Zimmermann as editor of the General Church 


the orthodoxy of his earlier days. 


Journal,* and used it as a means to oppose the reaction 
against rationalism.’ So far from recalling the state- 
ments of the Probabilia on account of their conse- 
quences, it is more likely, if we are to trace the subtle 
currents of bias, that he was induced to write them 
on account of the prominence given to the Fourth 
Gospel by Schleiermacher, and that he withdrew them 
because he saw no possible ground left on which 
they could be honestly maintained. But in his later 
years he was a controversialist rather than a critic, 
and regarded the episode of the Probabilia as one that 
he did not care to recall. 


2 Bibliotheca Sacra, ut supra, 
Oct. 1852 and April 1855. 

5 Hvanyelische Kirchen-Zeitung, 
Berlin. 

* Allgemeine 
Darmstadt. 

» ©The active antagonism into 


Kirchen-Zeitung, 


which he was now thrown with 


the revived orthodoxy, had the 
natural effect of rendering his 
tendency towards _ rationalism 
more decided. He had begun with 
being a rationalistic supranatura- 
list; he ended with being at most 
a supranaturalistic rationalist.’ 
Bibliotheca, Oct. 1852, p. 659. 


LECTURE IV. 191 


No name has been better known to the readers 
and thinkers of our own generation than that of 
Strauss, and although his work does not add much to 
the criticism of the Fourth Gospel, I should expose 
myself to fair censure for passing over one who is 
generally thought to be a strong adverse witness, if 
he were not included in our brief review. 

David Friedrich Strauss, whose sixty-six years 
of life extended from 1808 to 1874, was born at Lud- 
wigsburg in Swabia. His father, who had been en- 
gaged in trade, lost a large part of his means, and a 
temperament naturally morose became embittered, 
though he professedly followed the strictest lines of 
orthodox religion. He seems at no time to have had 
much sympathy with, or influence over, his son, and 
what he had did not extend to the son’s later manhood. 
The mother is said to have cared less for the outward 
forms of religion, but to have been a woman of 
healthy judgment and natural kindness which was 
often tested, and of warm affection for her son. 

At the age of thirteen the lad left the little day- 
school at Ludwigsburg for the seminary at Blau- 
beuren, which was then an evangelical college, but 
was called a ‘monastery’ from its earlier history. 
How big with issues for the after days of his own 
life, for the life of many another, was the day on 
which this step was taken! Here he met Christian 
Marklin, his fellow in work and play, his fellow in 
the doubts and struggles of his later life. He has 
himself given a sketch of Miirklin, ight indeed, but, 


Strauss, 
1808- 
1874. 


Home life. 


Blau- 
beuren. 


Tubingen. 


192 LECTURE IV. 


like all he touched, showing the master’s hand, and 
important to us, for in telling the friend’s life and 
thoughts he has told his own.® At Blaubeuren he 
found Kern the philologist, to whom he owed so much, 
and above all he found Baur, who, like himself, had 
gone there as a boy to school, and now, after a 
distinguished career at Tiibingen, had come back to 
teach. Five years later, the boys themselves went to 
the evangelical college or Sti/t in the same university. 
Kern and Baur soon followed as teachers. Ferdinand 
Christian Baur was in 1826 appointed Professor 
of Historical Theology in the old evangelical Uni- 
versity of Tiibingen ; and David Friedrich Strauss, a 
small-featured, delicate, overgrown youth of eighteen, 
was in his class-room. These days of Blaubeuren 
and Tiibingen are full of interest, but this is not 
the place or time for treating of them. The visits to 
his friend and townsman Kerner, that supra-supra- 
naturalist at Weinsberg; the period in which Strauss 
was led captive by clairvoyance, or perhaps by the 
fair ‘clairvoyante of Prevorst,’ her prophecy that he 
would always remain a believer ; the steps by which 
he was led from this yeast stage through Jacob 
Boehme to Schelling, Schleiermacher, Hegel ; his bril- 
liant examination and his popularity as an evangelical 
preacher in a country village ; his views of an esoteric 
ereed for the library and an exoteric doctrine for the 
pulpit ; his appointment and short stay as a teacher 
aut Maulbronn; the resignation and visit to Berlin 


ὁ Christian Marklin, ein Lebens- wnd Charakterbild, 1851. 


LECTURE IV: 193 


with the special desire to hear Hegel lecture ; the 
preliminary visit to Schleiermacher, who told him 
of Hegel’s sudden death ; his host’s displeased surprise 
when he thoughtlessly answered that the chief purpose 
of his visit to Berlin was thereby foiled ; the way in 
which he was impressed by Schleiermacher’s lectures ; 
his return to Swabia ; his appointment in 1832 as Re- 
petent at Tiibingen, in the beloved school of the older 
evangelical pietism, of Flatt and Storr and Bengel, and 
now presided over by Steudel, the most famous theo- 
logian and preacher of Wiirtemberg, great-grandson of 
Bengel, and his spiritual as well as lineal descendant ; 
the influence produced by the young tutor’s lectures ; 
his retirement to give himself to literary work ;— 
these things are told, and many more than these, by 
Strauss himself, by Baur, by Schwarz, in articles 
and memoirs, by friends and by foes, and with special 
interest in the charming sketch, which, with the 
loving hand of lifelong friendship, Dr. Eduard Zeller 
devoted to his memory.’ 

Three years had almost run their course since the 
appointment to Tiibingen. They were years of quiet 
calm for the Church. Since Hegel’s death in 1831, 
the influence of Schleiermacher and Schelling had be- 
come supreme. Philosophy and theology were one. 
Criticism was hushed into silence. Men of the severer 
orthodoxy, like Hengstenberg, who was now teach- 
ing at Berlin and editing the Lvangelical Church 
Journal, or of the carefully balancing, born critical 


1 Dawid Friedrich Strauss in his Life and Writings, 1874, Eng. 
Trans. 1879. O 


Berlin. 


Tutor at 
Tiibingen. 


Influence 
of Schlei- 
ermacher. 


The calm 
of 1834. 


The storm 
of 1835 
caused by 


the Leben 
Jesu. 


The 
replies. 


194 LECTURE IV. 


turn of mind of De Wette, or of the developing 
broader views of Bretschneider, who was opposing 
both Hengstenberg and Schleiermacher in the General 
Church Journal,’ did not much like the peace. But 
when Schleiermacher died in 1834, he left a position 
and an influence in theology and philosophy and 
their harmonious interdependence, which was with- 
out an example. The sky was clear as that of a 
summer’s day, and no cloud was to be seen on the 
horizon, when suddenly, as by the crash of thunder, 
Germany, and then France, England, America, the 
theological world, was aroused to know that a terrific | 
storm was at hand. 

It took its rise in the University of Tiibingen 
from which Strauss issued the first volume of his L7fe 
of Jesus in 1885. It was a bitter fate for Steudel, 
who mourns for the young man who sent forth the 
electric spark as it were from his own study.’ Had 
he not himself settled all theological difficulties by 
protesting against them in his work on the Dogmatics 
of the Evangelical Protestant Church, which had been 
only just published ? 5 

But the spark would not have become the lightning 
flash nor have heralded the storm if the atmosphere had 
not been charged with electricity, and if Steudel and a 
host of others who attempted to reply to Strauss, had 


8 Allgemeine Kirchen-Zeitung, Cf. Baur, Geschichte der christlichen 


ut supra. Kirche, vol. v., 1862, p. 364. 
9. Das Leben Jesu kritisch bear- * Glaubenslehre der evangelisch- 
beitet, 1835-6. protestantischen Kirche, 1834. 


᾿ς Aus seinem Cabinet heraus.’ 


LECTURE IV. 195 


not lent themselves as conductors for the fluid. Every 
village pulpit had its own antidote to the poison ; 
every candidate for a theological degree had as a 
thesis his own unanswerable answer; every church 
journal had its own editorial settlement of the ques- 
tion. And in this way the book was advertised 
throughout the world, and hundreds read it who 
would otherwise have never heard of it. And when 
they read it, they found it interesting, while the 
replies were dull ; for it was written in good German, 
and the answers in bad. Strauss was, like Renan, a 
born artist in words, and most people are more 
attracted by the pictures, the ornaments, the carvings 
and gildings of a house than they are by the founda- 
tions. But the foundations are more important if 
we are going to live in the house, and if it is to be 
to us a home to shield us by night as by day, in 
winter as in summer, in all the storms of life and 
death, in time, in eternity. 

It has often been said that there was nothing new 
in Strauss’s L2fe of Jesus. The critical methods which 
Heyne had introduced, and Wolf had applied to Homer, 
and Niebuhr to early Roman history, had already been 
applied by Vater, De Wette, and others to the books 
of the Old Testament, and even in the New Testament 
the way was not wholly unprepared. The discussions 
of the origin and relation of the Gospels had led also 
to a growing conviction that the explanation was to be 
found in the existence of an oral Gospel. Here there 
were grounds for the superstructure of the theory of 


a2 


‘ Nothing 
new’ in 
the Leben 
Jesu, 


Critical 
methods. 


The 
mythical 
theory. 


Later in- 
vestiga- 
tions of 
myths. 


Position of 
Bunsen, 


196 _ LECTURE Iv. 


myth, and once started it was carried with mecha- 
nical rigidity through every detail of the life of 
Jesus. Strauss honestly believed himself to be abso- 
lutely free from prejudice, but he was bound hand 
and foot by the dogmas of the Hegelian Left. The 
individual is nothing, and therefore historical records 
which treat of the individual are of no authority. 
The Infinite cannot manifest itself in the finite, and 
therefore the incarnation as told in the Gospels is 
impossible. Humanity is the true incarnation of 
God, the child of a known mother—Nature ; of an 
unknown father—Spirit. The immanence of God 
is absolute, and miracle is therefore impossible. The 
legends of the Old Testament which grew round the 
Messianic idea were mythically applied to the person 
of the historic Jesus. The Church portrayed, not 
the Jesus whom Apostles saw, but the Christ which 
myth unconsciously created. 

I must not, however, be tempted to wander so far 
from my immediate subject as to state, and far less 
to criticise, the philosophical theology of Strauss. 
Later investigations have taught us that upon any 
theory of myths they belong to the infancy of the na- 
tion and not to its manhood.? The vigorous com- 
mon sense of Baron de Bunsen at once cried out :— 


But the idea of men writing mythic histories between 
the time of Livy and Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking such 
for realities ! 4 

3. Cf. the able articles Myth, * Letter to Dr. Arnold, Oct. 1836. 
Mythical Theory, Mythology, in Life of Arnold, by Dean Stanley, 


McClintock and Strong’s Cyclo- ed. 12, vol. ii. p. 52, note. 
pedia. New York, 1880. 


LECTURE IV. 197 


Ullmann held Strauss in a grip from which there Ulmann, 
was no release when he asked History or Myth?° 
If the Church unconsciously developed the Christ, 
then who or what developed the Church? And in Baur. 
the greater mind of Strauss’s master there was 
already growing a theory of tendency, which, what- 
ever else it was to do, was certainly to deal a death- 
blow to the theory of myth. 

Strauss’s critique of the Life of Jesus contained The Leben 


Jesu con- 
no critique of the Gospels which were the source of tained no 


that life. He admitted that this was a weak point of thay 
when Baur called attention to it.© His whole theory ΜΠ 
is however based upon an assumption of the spurious- 

ness of all the Canonical Gospels, and especially of 

that of the Fourth Gospel. If this be really a Gospel 
according to 8. John, the mythical theory of Strauss 

is at an end; and yet so uncertain is he of his 
ground, that in the preface to the third edition, which 

was published in 1838-9, he is not quite sure that 

the Gospel was after all not the work of ὃ. John. It 

is not that he is drawn over to the conviction that it 

is Apostolic ; but that the work of Neander and the 
growing conviction of De Wette have told upon him, 

and he is no longer sure that it is not. But in the 
fourth edition, which followed in 1840, he is again 

quite sure. And this on no secondary question, but Incredible 
on one which was at the very foundation of his whole eanity 
theory. This uncertainty is so incredible that I 


5. Historisch oder Mythisch? Hamburg, 1838. 
δ. Cf. Lecture V. p. 231. 


about 
John, 


described 
by Baur. 


Strauss’s 
life 
between 
the third 
and fourth 
editions. 


198 LECTURE IV. 


prefer to put it before you in the words of Baur, his 
tutor and friend :— 


Nothing is more indicative of the position of criticism at 
that time than the confession which Strauss makes in the pre- 
face to the third edition of his Life of Jesus. The alterations 
which occur in this new edition all depend more or less on 
the fact that a renewed study of the Fourth Gospel had made 
his earlier doubts of this gospel themselves in their turn 
doubtful. Not that he was convinced of its authenticity, but 
that he was no longer convinced of the contrary. In the 
peculiar position of the characteristics of this most remarkable 
gospel, trustworthy and incredible, likely and unlikely, cross- 
ing and colliding with each other, he brought forward in the 
first development of his work, with polemical zeal, just the 
adverse side which it seemed to him had been neglected. 
Since then the other side has gradually received its due from 
him, but he was not in a position to do as almost all other 
living theologians even to De Wette did—that is, sacrifice at 
once the opposite considerations. Is it possible for a man to 
be more wavering and uncertain on one of the chief problems 
of New Testament criticism ? And yet even this utterance 
is made only that in the next edition of the Life of Jesus he 
might withdraw this doubting of his own doubt.’ 


But a good deal had occurred between the issue 
of the third and fourth editions. His mother died 
in March 1839, and with her the chief joy and solace 
of his life had gone. The father, never in sympathy 
with him, had been embittered by the publication of 
his book, and the mother’s last days had been saddened 
by storms which broke upon the peace of home. The 
brother lay weak and ill. His friends sought for him 


7 Strauss, Leben Jesu, Preface  schichte Jesu, 1876, p. 32. Cf. 
to ed. 3, 1838-9; and Hase, Ge- Lecture V. pp. 230 sq. 


LECTURE IV. 199 


work and hope without, to draw him from these mise- 
ries within. He was nominated this same year to the 
chair of Christian Dogmatics and Ethics at Ziirich. 
He did not think his views to be inconsistent with the 
duties which would devolve upon him, and gladly 
accepted it; but feeling ran so high, that forty 
thousand signatures were attached to a public protest. 
Strauss darf und soll nicht kommen! became the cry 
of an excited populace. In vain did the would-be 
professor explain his views in a letter to the burgo- 
master and citizens. In vain did his friend Professor 
Orelli explain for him. Strauss darf und soll nicht 
kommen ! was the reply which the people were ready 
to maintain by force of arms. In vain did the ministry 
at length yield, cancel the appointment, and pen- 
sion the professor. It was too late. Ziirich would 
have none of Strauss, and Ziirich rose in insurrection 
and deposed a government which had tried to force 
him upon them. 

It is never very profitable to speculate upon what 
might have been. What if that mother had not died, 
if that father had been full of sympathy and guiding 
love, if that brother had been strong and well ? What 
if the professor’s chair had brought that disturbed 
mind into contact with the thoughts and needs of 
student life, and outside the contracted circles of itself 
and its one fixed idea? We know not. 

We know what was. There came in the following 


8 The Opinions of Professor Eng. Trans. from 2nd ed., 1844, 
David F. Strauss, etc., 1865. of original. 


Nomina- 
tion to 
Ziirich, 


Fourth 
edition 


and the 
Christ- 
liche 
Glaubens- 
lehre. 


200 LECTURE IV. 


year the fourth and most extreme edition of the Life, 
written for the first time in the German character that 
it might be accessible to the people, and there came 
also a work on Christian Dogmatics i their historical 
development and in their struggle with modern know- 
ledge. This was the completion of Strauss’s original 
plan, to write a work upon the idea—BLegrifi—as well 
as one upon the representation— Vorstellung—of theo- 
logical truth, which he had done in the Life of Jesus. 
For our present purpose the work is important, as it 
foretold the appearance of a book which would be 
based upon sounder principles than Bretschneider’s 
Probabilia, and would settle the question of the 
Gospels in the light of fresh knowledge of early Church 
history. The reference is said’ to be to the singular 
work of Liitzelberger,? who visited Strauss this year 
and published his book soon afterwards. It aimed at 
proving that John was never in Ephesus or Asia Minor, 
that he died before a.p. 55-57, and that the Gospel was 
written in the neighbourhood of Edessa, about A.D. 
135-140. But this work seems of too little importance 
for the weighty words of Strauss’s reference, and I 
cannot help thinking that the work of Baur was that 
of which he prophesied, not without some knowledge.* 
® Die christliche Glaubenslehre * Die kirchliche Tradition dber 
in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicke- den Apostel Johannes und seine 
lungundim Kampfe mit der moder- Schriften, wm ihrer Grundlosigkeit 
nen Wissenschaft, 1840. Seeesp. nachgewiesen. Leipzig, 1840. 
vol. i. pp. 194-196. 5 But see Bleek’s criticism on 
1 Ebrard, Wissenschaftliche Kri- — Liitzelberger in Beitriige sur Evan- 


tik, 1842, pp. 1049 5α. note. Darm-  gelien-Kritik, 1846, pp. 88 sqq., 
stiidter Kirchenzeitung, Jan. 1841. and 224 sq. 


LECTURE IV. 201 


For more than twenty years Strauss produced no 
theological work. He has himself told, and therefore 
he wishes everybody to know something of what his 
life was during this period. Without the home which 
his mother’s love had always blessed, refused the work 
for which he had always hoped, his friends had 
rejoiced to watch the influence which was exercised 
over him by Friiulein Agnes Schebest, a lady whose 
natural gifts and acquired power had won for her a 
prominent position on the operatic stage. They were 
betrothed in August 1842 ; five years later they dis- 
solved, by mutual agreement, a union which neither 
could endure longer. He told the story of these 
years in one touching sentence from a short paper on 
Memories of my good Mother, which he wrote for his 
daughter on the day of her confirmation :— 


The mother left me behind in a wild storm which Fate 
had brought upon me, and the brother in a still more totter- 
ing state; but often ieee I since thought it a happy thing 
that she ad not live to see the worse storm which a few years 
later dashed my life’s barque upon the rocks.‘ 


In the political troubles of 1848, Strauss was 
pressed by the extreme liberals of Ludwigsburg to 
become a candidate for the Frankfort parliament, and 
against his own judgment yielded to their wishes. 
He was not returned, but obtained a seat in the second 
chamber of Wiirtemberg. The fact is not without 

4 Kleine Schriften, Neue Folge, meine lieben Kinder. Geschrieben 


1866, pp. 233-269: Zum Anden- auf den Confirmationstag meiner 
ken an meine gute Mutter. Fiir Tochter, den 11. April, 1858. 


No theo- 
logical 
work in 
period 
1840.- 
1864. 


Agnes 
Schebest. 


Strauss in 
parlia- 
ment. 


Other iite- 
rary work. 


The new 
Leben 
Jesu, 1864, 


202 LECTURE IV. 


importance to us as it throws further light upon the 
character of the man, that to the indignant surprise of 
his constituents he was found to be on the conserva- 
tive side. He published his addresses to the electors 
in Six Theological Political Popular Speeches, and tells 
them in the preface how he had been convinced that 


direct elective proceedings hold good all the less, the more 
unlimited is the right of election... . 


Again, he writes in a letter of May 30, 1849 :— 


. if I have only to choose between the despotism of the 
prince and the masses, I am unhesitatingly in favour of the 
former . . . the last drop of blood in me abhors the autho- 
rity of demagogues as the extreme of all evils.® 


His critical powers found a congenial sphere dur- 
ing this period in a series of biographical and literary 
works which do not fall within our subject, but I shall 
venture to suggest to anyone who would know the 
chastened beauty of the mind and life of Strauss, and 
would know how deeply it was penetrated by the 
spirit of the life of Jesus, in the midst of much from 
which we shrink—the loving heart asserting what 
the analytical intellect denied—a half-hour’s study of 
the address on renunciation, which he delivered in 
1863 over his brother’s open grave.® 


In 1864 Strauss came back again to his earlier 
work in a new Life of Jesus composed for the German 
° Zeller, Strauss, ut supra, pp. 1866, pp. 341-351. Worte des 


90, 93. Andenkens an Friedrich Wilhelm 
“ Kleine Schriften, NeueFolge, Strauss, Feb. 24, 1863. 


LECTURE IV. 203 


People.” It was new, and not new, for it was largely 
an attempt to find a place for the later investigations 
of Baur and others, within the circle of the author’s 
mythical theory ; and he follows Baur in placing the 
Fourth Gospel after the middle of the second century. 

The preface prepares us for what we are to expect 
in the book. The first edition of the Leben Jesu, 
written twenty-nine years before, had been written 
for theologians, since the laity were not yet sufficiently 
prepared for it. But now the author writes for the 
laity and endeavours to make himself clear to every 
man of culture and thought. As for professional 
theologians, he does not care whether they read his 
book or πού. 

The interval has taught him on the one hand that 
these questions are not to be kept from the public, 
for they have been brought home to them by those 
who were his most determined foes; and, on the 
other hand, theologians are of all people those who 
can least attain to an impartial judgment, for they 
are at the same time judge and party in the suit. 
To question the evangelic history is, they think, to 
endanger the clerical order, and self-preservation 15 
the first law of life. If Christianity ceases to be a 
miracle, they cannot play their favourite réle of 
miracle-workers ; they will have to keep to teaching 
and give up blessing, and the work is less easy and 
less productive. He must turn to the people because 


7 Das Leben Jesu fiir das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, 1864. 
© 1bid..p.-4. 


written 
for the 
laity, 


‘ theo- 
logians’ 
are the 
least im- 
partial, 


M. Renan, 


earlier 
Lives of 
Jesus, 


204 LECTURE IV. 


the theologians will not hear, as ὃ. Paul turned to 
the Gentiles because the Jews rejected his Gospel. 
When once the best among the people shall have at- 
tained the height of rejecting what most of the clergy 
insist on offering them, these clergy will have to yield 
before the force of advanced public opinion. He 
addresses himself therefore to the people, and issues 
not so much a new edition, as a new work developing 
the oldidea ; and he takes the opportunity of referring 
to more recent works, answering objections and cor- 
recting his results by later researches by himself and 
others. If ever a new edition of the original work is 
needed—he did not see that the day had long gone 
by for needing it—it is to be based upon the first 
edition with some slight modifications from the fourth, 
that is, his views are to be preserved in their ex- 
tremest forms. 

He hails with joy M. Renan’s work, which ap- 
peared just as his own was completed. Condemned 
as it was by a large number of bishops and by the 
Roman Curia, it must necessarily be a work of 
merit. It has its defects, but only one fundamental 
fault [that is, the acceptance of the Fourth Gospel ].° 

Nor is the promise of this preface disappointed 
when we come to the critical introduction which fol- 
lows in the body of the work. The author clears the 
ground by showing how all the preceding Lives of 
Jesus—the earlier ones of Hess and Herder, the 
detailed work of Paulus, the Manual of Hase, the 


® Leben Jesu, 1864, ut supra, Ὁ. xviil. 


LECTURE IV. 205 


posthumous Lessons of Schleiermacher—had all failed 
for different reasons, and pre-eminently because their 
writers did not see how certain it was that documents 
which told of the supernatural could not possibly be 
historical. And the subsequent works of Neander, 


Ebrard, Weisse, and Ewald were all in his opinion’ 


reactionary, and are criticised in terms which I refrain 
from quoting. Even Keim,’ while flattering himself 
that he satisfies scientific requirements, is really 
steeped in theological illusion, but he is far in advance 
of the ordinary writers of Lives of Jesus, and even of 
M. Renan? 

When Strauss comes to his criticism of the Gos- 
pels as the sources of the Life of Jesus, the absence 
of which, as we have seen, Baur had proved to be 
a serious defect in the earlier form of the work, he 
satisfies himself that there is no certain trace of the 
three first Gospels in their present form, until towards 
the middle of the second century,’ that is, for fully a 
hundred years after the events are supposed to have 
taken place ; and this interval everybody will admit 
to have been long enough for the growth of fictitious 
elements in all parts of the evangelic record. He 
supposes that no one will deny this, not even the 
theologian, if he has not wholly broken with criticism. 

But the theologian, by way of compensation, as 

The reference is not to Keim’s = liche Entwickelung Jesu Christi, 
larger Jeswvon Nazara, which did 1861. 
not appear until 1867-72, but to * Leben Jesu, 1864, ut supra, 


his Inaugural Lecture at Ziirich op. 37. Vie de Jésus, 1863. 
at the end of 1860, Die mensch- 5. Ut supra, p. 61. 


critique 
of the 
Gospels, 


the 
‘ theo- 
logian ’ 


clings 
to the 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Weakness 
of the 
external 
evidence: 


Papias, 


206 LECTURE IV. 


Strauss thinks, clings more firmly to the Fourth 
Gospel as the work of an Apostle and an eyewitness, 
and the solid foundation of the history of primitive 
christianity. This must surely be founded upon 
internal evidences, for of external testimony the 
Fourth Gospel is only more destitute than the other 
three. Papias tells us at least that Matthew composed 
a Hebrew Gospel, but of a Gospel of John we have 
no evidence that he says a word. It is true that we 
know Papias only through Eusebius, but as the his- 
torian set himself to collect the testimonies in favour 
of the books of the New Testament, and as he quotes 
Papias in favour of the First Epistle of John, the 
silence of Eusebius about the Gospel is almost equi- 
valent to that of Papias himself. And the silence of 
Papias is the more significant as he speaks expressly 
of his zeal in seeking for traditions of John; and 
further, as he was a bishop in Asia Minor and a friend 
of Polycarp, he had every facility for being exactly 
acquainted with the Apostle who passed his last years 
αὖ Ephesus. 

The attempt to make Papias witness to the 
Fourth Gospel indirectly through the Epistle, must 
in Strauss’s opinion fail, since Eusebius simply tells 
us that Papias derived certain quotations from this 
Epistle as he does from the first Epistle of Peter. It 
is not necessary to understand him to mean that 
Papias definitely quoted as words of the Apostle John 


* Leben Jesu, 1864, ut supra, δ Leben Jesu, Ὁ. 63. Cf. Hist. 
p. 62. Eccles, iii. 39. 17. 
° Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 404 sqq. 


LECTURE IV. 207 


passages which we now find in the Epistle of John. 
Eusebius might have deduced from a certain resem- 
blance of expressions or ideas the conclusion that 
Papias had known the Epistle, and have been deceived, 
just as theologians in our own days have deceived 
themselves in similar circumstances. And even if we 
press the most positive interpretation of Eusebius, 
and suppose that Papias had really quoted the First 
Epistle as a work from the hand of the Apostle, we 
should still have to prove that the Epistle and the 
Gospel come from the same author. It is granted 
that there are resemblances, but there are also very 
marked differences. 

But the conclusion of the Fourth Gospel itself is 


the 
Fourth 


adduced as a witness. This is in the opinion of Gospel 


writers like Tholuck a certificate of authenticity suffi- 
cient to satisfy the most extreme scepticism ;‘ and yet 
Zeller is quite right in saying that this testimony 
proves nothing. It is either the assertion of the author 
himself which would not be testimony, or else it is the 
assertion of an interpolator which would be of no value. 
It is equally vain to attempt to support the author- 
ship by such a reference as that in the second Epistle 
of Peter® to the putting off the tabernacle, which is 
supposed to be a reminiscence of our Lord’s words 
in the last chapter of John, for there is no proof that 
this Epistle is much earlier than the close of the 
second century ; or by the resemblance between 


7 Leben Jesu, wt supra, Ὁ. 63. — schen Geschichte, p. 276. 
Die Glaubenwiirdigkert der evangeli- ὃ 2 Peter i. 14; ef. John xxi. 18. 


itself, 


Second 
Epistle of 
Peter, 


Ignatius, 


Justin 
Martyr, 


208 LECTURE IV. 


S. John and ὃ. Mark, for it does not follow that 
S. John is the earlier.” 

Ignatius is supposed to furnish examples of 
reminiscences of the Fourth Gospel. Perhaps he 
does. But even if the phrases which are alleged ! are 
more than specimens of the common religious language 
of the time, it is certain, Strauss thinks, that the 
Epistles of Ignatius cannot be placed before the 
middle of the second century ;* and if the Fourth 
Gospel had been received as Apostolic from the end 
of the first century, it would have left deeper marks 
upon these and other writings of the period. 

The evidence of Justin Martyr is similarly disposed 
of. There are numerous and indisputable points of 
contact with the three first Gospels, but those with 
the Fourth Gospel are both rare and doubtful. But 
the doctrine of Justin is allied to that of the Fourth 
Gospel, and if he had known it to be an Apostolic 
work, he would have followed it more closely.2 The 
only reference which is of importance is that in the 
first Apology to the new birth, which Strauss ex- 
plains in what was then the usual method of the 
negative school. He compares it with a passage 
in the Clementines,? and thinks that both Justin 
and the writer of the Fourth Gospel had borrowed 
from a common source in the supposed Gospel of the 


® Leben Jesu, ut supra, pp. 64, 5. Cf. Lecture II. p. 81. 

65. * Apology, i. 61. Cf. John iii. 
1 Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 395 sqq. 3-5. 
2 Cf. ibid. pp. 400 sqq. ° Homil, xi. 26. 


LECTURE IV. 209 


Hebrews. The evidence of the Philosophwmena,® the 
author of which he supposes to be a pseudo-Origen, 
by no means proves that Basilides or Valentinus 
knew the Fourth Gospel, for it is not certain that 
the reference is in either case to the founder of the 
sect as distinguished from his followers. It is true 
that Tertullian tells us that Valentinus used a 
complete Jnstrument—that is, a Testament.® But then 
Tertullian’s testimony, if it cannot be denied, can be 
discounted. He was not more capable of distinguish- 
ing between the founder of the sects and his followers 
than the pseudo-Origen was, and when he tells us 
in express terms that Valentinus possessed a complete 
New Testament, we should do well to inquire no 
further from him. It is similar to what he tells us 
of Marcion’s” having rejected, and therefore having 
known, the Fourth Gospel. 

Then, as to the attempts, in the absence of external 
evidence, to prove on internal grounds—the names of 
the wons, for example—that Valentinus must have 
known the prologue and other portions of the Fourth 
Gospel. If this be so, why does Irenzeus quote so 
many passages of the synoptics and of Paul, and not 
one from John when he is enumerating the places of 
the New Testament upon which the Valentinians 
founded their system of wons?! The quotations from 


® Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 960 sqq. 9. Adv. Marcion. iv. 3, 5; De 

7 Leben Jesu, ut supra, pp. 67, Carne Christi, ὃ. Cf. Lecture IT. 
68. Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 361 sqq. ρ. 94. 

8 De Prescript. Heret. xxxviii. 1 Adv. Her. i. 8. 1-4. Cf. 
Cf. Lecture II. p. 92. Lecture 11. p. 90. 


Ῥ 


the Phi- 
losophu- 
mena. 


The 
internal 
evidence: 


the Valen- 
tinians, 


the Mon- 
tanists, 


the Cle- 
mentines, 


the Apo- 
logists, 


Theophi- 
lus, 


Irenzus. 


210 LECTURE IV. 


John come only in an appendix on Ptolemeus, the 
disciple of Valentinus, and of him it is admitted from 
his Letter to Flora that he accepted the Gospel of 
John as an Apostolic work.” Nor is the commentary 
of Heracleon doubted. But this letter and commen- 
tary can hardly be placed earlier than the last thirty 
years of the second century. 

The same line of observation applies to the 
evidence of the Montanists, who are supposed to 
have derived their idea of the Paraclete from the 
Gospel of John ; but if we inquire of Eusebius about 
their earliest connexion with the Church, we find 
nothing of either the term Paraclete or of the Fourth 
Gospel. Like the Valentinians, they had originally 
no knowledge of the Gospel of John; but when it 
appeared later, both heresies hastened to lay hold 
of it. 

The references in the newly discovered portion 
of the Clemeniines* cannot, in Strauss’s opinion, be 
denied, nor the passage in the fragments of Apoli- 
naris,’ nor yet the references in the apologies of 
Tatian, and Athenagoras, nor in the works of Theo- 
philus,’ and Ireneus. But Theophilus is not to be 
accredited, because he does not give us his authority 
for attributing the Gospel to John; nor is Irenzus, 


* Leben Jesu, ut supra, p. 68. 446 sq. ; Homil. iii. 53; and Lec- 
3 Hist. Eccles. v. 16-19. ture IT. p. 84. 
* Cf. Lecture VII. pp. 373 sqq. 6 Chron. Paschal. Al. p. 14, 
° Leben Jesu, ut supra, Ὁ. 69. ed. Dindorf. 
Homil. xix. 22. Cf. article by 7 Ad Autolycum, ii. 22. Cf. 
Volkmar, Theol. Jahrb. 1854, pp. Lecture I. pp. 29 sqq. 


LECTURE IV. 211 


because he does not tell us that he learned the authen- 
ticity of the Gospel from Polycarp, and because he 
does not always write with historical accuracy. 

The Gospel, moreover, was not received without 
opposition towards the end of the second century, as 
is known from the Alogi.2 Strauss would emphasize 
their position, and regrets that they did not them- 
selves see how strong it really was. They were 
quite right to reject the Gospel, but it was dogmatic 
prejudice 1 6 which led them to reject the Apocalypse. 
And this was a oreat tactical mistake. The relation 
of the two writings’ is such.that one can no more 
believe that the same person was author of both 
works than one can persuade Germans that Lessing 
composed the Messiah, or Klopstock composed 
Nathan. The two works represent the extreme poles 
of New Testament writings: the Apocalypse being 
the most Judaistic of all, and the Gospel the least so. 
Modern criticism, especially the school of Schleier- 
macher, had recognized this distinction, and framed 
a syllogism with the minor premise, ‘John is the 
author of the Gospel,’ and the conclusion, ‘John is 
not, therefore, the author of the Apocalypse.’ The 
Tiibingen school inverted the minor and derived the 
conclusion, ‘John is not, therefore, the author of 


the Gospel ;’ and if one of the two works must have > 


had the Apostle for an author, it is on all grounds 
much more likely to have been the Apocalypse than 
8 Cf. Lecture III. pp. 123 sqq. 1 Leben Jesu, ut supra, pp. 72, 
9. Hist. Eccles. vii. 25. 73. 
P2 


The Alcgi, 
their 
tactical 
mistake in 
rejecting 
the Apoca- 
lypse. 


Summary. 


Returns 
later to the 
question. 


212 LECTURE IV. 


the Gospel. This view is further supported by the 
original Asiatic tradition on the Paschal controversy.” 

To sum up, if we start from our knowledge of 
John, we do not arrive at the Fourth Gospel; and if 
we start from our knowledge of the Fourth Gospel, 
we are in danger of not arriving, or rather, we shall 
not arrive at 5. John. 

The result of the examination of the sources of 
the life of Jesus is that for the Synoptics, considering 
the interval of several generations between the events 
which they relate and the final form which they 
assumed, the possibility of legendary and fabulous 
traces must be admitted ; while for the Fourth Gospel 
the alloy of philosophic speculation and conscious 
fiction is more than possible—it is probable.’ 

At a later stage in the work Strauss returns to the 
Johannine question, and examines briefly the position 
of Bretschneider, Schleiermacher, Weisse, Schweizer, 
Renan, Baur and his school.* He sees clearly 
that no intermediate position is possible. When 
Baur came on the field the Gospel had challenged 
criticism to a duel to the death. She must break up 
her armour and place the débris at the foot of the 
Gospel, or else she must deprive the Gospel of all 
historic authority and prove it to be a work posterior 
to the Apostles ; and when so considered to be as 
clear as it is incomprehensible when it claims to be 
by an Apostle. To have undertaken this combat, 


9 Leben Jesu, ut supra, pp. 76, 77. 3 Ibid. pp. 77-79. 
* Ibid. pp. 90-94, and 98 sqq. 


LECTURE IV. 245 


and to have carried it through as such combats 
seldom have been carried through, he regards as the 
imperishable glory of Baur.® 

Such in brief outline is the critical foundation, as 
far as it affects the Fourth Gospel, of Strauss’s new 
Life of Jesus. Reverence for an adversary so re- 
nowned compels us to take it into our account, but it 
is not necessary for us at this moment to consider it at 
any length. It is like the work itself—new and not 
new. It is by Strauss, and not by Strauss. The critical 
part is essentially a presentation of the later results 
of the Tiibingen school, as the support of his own 
earlier theories ; and the author avowedly bases them 
upon the labour of this school. Some of them have 
met us already ; others will meet us again ; not a few 
of them almost provoke a smile as we hear them. 
And this was the highest result of criticism only a 
quarter of a century ago! 

But when Strauss had thus set forth the results of 
the criticism of Baur and his school as the foundation 
of his own work, it became necessary to see that the 
older superstructure could be fitted on to this new 
foundation. 

He tells us that in his Critical Examination of the 
Lafe of Jesus he had arrived at the Fourth Gospel by 
way of the other three, which had served him as a point 
of departure and had helped him to understand the 
Fourth. His fundamental conception of what he 
calls the fictitious element of the Gospels was that of 


° Leben Jesu, p. 108. Cf. Lecture V. pp. 230 sqq. 


Strauss’s 
critique is 
really that 
of the 
Tiibingen 
school. 


The older 
work will 
not fit on 
this new 
critique. 


Conscious 
and un- 
conscious 
fiction. 


Strauss 
and Baur. 


214 LECTURE IV. 


myth; and by myth he understood the so-called 
historic wrapping, which certain original conceptions 
of Christianity had received from the spontaneous 
fiction of legend. But this formula which he had 
derived from his study of the fictitious elements of 
the Synoptics, did not quite adapt itself to the Fourth 
Gospel. It was necessary to enlarge it, and to replace 
spontaneous fiction by arbitrary and conscious fiction. 
Baur’s study of the Fourth Gospel started, however, 
from the idea of a free composition of religious specu- 
lation, the fundamental notion of which was to oppose 
to the divine principle of light and life, incarnate in 
Jesus, Jewish incredulity considered as the principle 
of darkness ; and the plan consisted in following step 
by step the struggle of the two principles and in 
presenting it in the form of historic drama. This, 
Strauss tells us, was Baur’s fundamental notion, from 
which he tried to deduce the distinctive marks which 
separate the Fourth Gospel from the other three, both 
as to its composition and its choice and arrangement 
of the evangelic material. He thinks it an admirable 
point of view for the Fourth Gospel, but that it is 
not equally applicable to the other three, and that in 
consistently applying it to them Baur is sometimes 
driven to arbitrary expedients.° 

But Strauss is not quite happy about this union 
of his own fundamental conception of myth with 
Baur’s fundamental conception of purpose, and in a 


ὁ Leben Jesu, ut supra, pp. 108, 109. 


LECTURE IV. 215 


later section he returns to discuss generally the 
notion of myth.’ 

In the earlier work he had presented myth as the 
key of the miraculous records and of other historical 
difficulties in the Gospels. It was loss of time and 
trouble, he used to say, to try and reduce stories like 
that of the star of the Magi, and the transfiguration, 
and the multiplication of the loaves to the order of 
natural events ; and, as it was equally impossible to 
admit the reality of facts so contrary to the laws of 
nature, it was necessary to take these records for 
poetic fictions. And when he had to account for the 
appearance of these fictions at the period of the 
Gospels, he found the key in the Messianic expecta- 
tion. As soon as a number of persons saw in Jesus 
the Messiah, they easily persuaded themselves that all 
the prophecies and figures of the Old Testament, with 
the addition of the Rabbinic interpretations, must 
find their fulfilment in Jesus. Everybody knew that 
Jesus was born at Nazareth, but the Messiah must 
in accord with the prophecy of Micah be born at 
Bethlehem. Tradition had preserved strong words 
of Jesus against the Jewish love of miracles ; but 
Moses had wrought miracles, and Jesus must be 
made to work miracles too. Isaiah had foretold that 
in the Messianic period the blind should see, the deaf 
hear, and soon. The very details of the miracles of 
the Messiah were marked out, and there grew up 


7 Leben Jesu, p. 150. 
8 Ibid. vol. i. pp. 72 sqq. of ed. 1; pp. 91 sqq. of ed. 4. 


Re-writing 
of the 
theory of 
myth. 


Bruno 
Bauer, 
1809- 
1882, 


Volkmar. 


Earlier 
and later 
theories of 
myth. 


216 LECTURE IV. 


naturally in the early Christian community uncon- 
scious fictions that these works had been actually 
wrought by Jesus. 

This was the fundamental principle of Strauss’s 
earlier work, but nearly thirty years have now passed, 
and meanwhile Bruno Bauer has been trying to prove 
that the Messianic idea, so far from being wholly 
rooted in Jewish theology, took its rise only with 
John Baptist, and attained definite proportions only 
about the late date of the composition of the Gospels, 
and then not among Jews but among Christians : ” 
while Volkmar has asserted a middle position and is 
not prepared to go so far as Strauss in the pre- 
Christian details of the Messianic idea.’ 

And there comes back once again the difficulty 
which more especially concerns our present subject. 
Strauss sees that he cannot apply the view of myth 
which suited the simple and legendary poetry of the 
earlier Gospels to what he calls the more or less con- 
scious inventions like those of the Fourth Gospel. 
He tries to justify himself by the usage of the older 
writers on myths down to Heyne. Modern mytholo- 
gists, and especially Welcker, had reserved the term 
myth for the primitive, natural, unconscious legend ; 
but the earlier writers who had created the term, had 
applied it to all religious traditions which were not 
historical, whatever their source was. And while 
Welcker’s distinction is good as between fictions 


° Leben Jesu, ut supra, p. 150. Synoptiker, vol. i. pp. 181, 391-416. 
Kritik der Evangeliengeschichte der 1 Die Religion Jesu, pp. 112 sqq. 


LECTURE IV. 7 


which all admit, as in Greek history, the critic of the 
Gospels has to ask, in the face of assertions that they 
are historically true, not what is the distinction 
between myths and myths, not whether the Evangelist 
is consciously or unconsciously a poet, but whether 
his narrative is poetry or history.” 

Strauss is disappointed to find that his theory of 
myth is after one generation really dead, and the 
depth of his disappointment is read in the bitterness 
of his words. Ewald he believes to be really a 
disciple of the mythical school, who banishes the 
terms myth and mythical from the whole domain of 
Biblical exegesis only because he had not first 
thought of it himself. He quotes with approval the 
opinion of an English writer that Ewald is one ‘to 
whom the celebrity of any opinion not emanating from 
himself is sufficient reason for condemning and con- 
tradicting it,’ who ‘wraps his virtue in an obscurity 
of inflated verbiage,’ and who acts on the maxim 
‘Denounce your adversary in unmeasured terms for 
what he says, and then in slightly varying language 
quietly adopt his suggestions,’’ and is not sorry to 
see how well the great man of Géttingen is known 
on the English side of the Channel.’ 

He is not pleased even with Baur, upon whom he 
is seeking to support himself, for though Baur has 
not absolutely excluded myth from the evangelic 


2 Leben Jesu, ut supra, pp. 156, and its Antecedents, 1863, pp. 343, 
157. 345, 351, note. But cf. pp. 250 sq. 
3 Mackay, The Tiibingen School * Leben Jesu, ut supra, p. 158. 


Strauss’s 
disap- 
point- 
ment. 


His view of 
Ewald, 


and Baur. 


The 
mythical 
theory 
dead. 


Myth 
cannot 
live with 
Design. 


218 LECTURE IV. 


history, he avoids it as much as possible and speaks 


of the theory of myth as the complete opposite of 
his own. Strauss thinks that he is playing the γόϊο 
of a conservative at his own expense, and naturally 
does not quite see what right he has to do so. In 
this new Leben Jesu, having regard to the results of 
Baur, Strauss has made more prominent the idea of 
intentional and conscious fiction, but he still clings 
to the earlier terminology of myth with the tenacity 
of a man who loves his own idea as a mother loves 
her child, and even when it is wounded—dead—loves 
it yet the more, and declares it cannot be dead and 
shall not die.? 

But it was dead. Baur was right. His own 
position was the very antipodes of that of Strauss, 
and a man cannot stand upright on both sides of the 
globe at the same moment. 

The new work came too late. It is slain by the 
very strength to which it clings. Myth cannot be 
conscious and unconscious. Unconscious Myth can- 
not live in the embrace of deliberate Design. Strauss 
cannot support himself on Baur, even if Baur be 
willing that he should. It must be a duel to the death, 
and as between those combatants no one doubts who 
remainsthe victor, though the giant generously keeps 
the button on his foil. Strauss darf und soll nicht 
kommen ! is now the watchword, not of the burghers 
of Ziirich led by their clergy, but of the thinkers of 


5 Leben Jesu, ut supra, p. 159. 


LECTURE IV. 219 


Christendom led by their most eminent scientific 
teachers of every shade of opinion. And while 
scientific opinion was thus convinced that the mythi- 
cal theory of the Gospels was at an end, the lighter 
popular opinion that had fed upon Strauss was caught 
by the new work of M. Renan which had appeared the 
previous year, and had substituted a theory of legend 
for that of myth, and had placed the Fourth Gospel 
at the close of the first century.° 

Strauss has no further word to speak on the 
criticism of the Fourth Gospel. It is not for us 
to dwell therefore on later words, which both from 
their intellectual contradictions and their unba- 
lanced tone were a. shock even to his friends. 
It is not for us to dwell on the lessons of a we 
manguée. We have one conclusion to draw which 
cannot be questioned. Strauss makes no substan- 
tial addition to the destructive attack on the 
Fourth Gospel. His sketch of criticism which 1 
have briefly set before you is, as we have just seen, 
nothing more than a presentation of the extremer 
views of the Tiibingen school as the foundation of 
a position which that school had shattered.’ I will 
not further claim that Baur and Strauss stand on 


6 Cf. Lecture V. pp. 255 sq. Hvangelien, pp. 349 sqq. ; Zeller, 
7 Cf. Lecture V. passim. Die dusseren Zeugnisse,—Theol. 
Strauss himself quotes the follow- Jahrbiicher, 1845 and 1847 ; Hil- 
ing authors as his authorities:— genfeld, Die Hvangelien, pp. 344 
Bretschneider, Probabilia, pp. 566. ; Die Evangelien Justins, pp. 
178 sqq.; Baur, Kritische Un- 292 sqq. 
tersuchungen uber die kanonischen 


Renan’s 
theory of 
legend. 


Strauss 
makes no 
substan- 
tial 
addition 
to the 
criticism. 


oF0 LECTURE IV. 


different sides of the equation and cancel each other, 
though such claim may be in some measure sus- 
tained, because 1 regard Baur, in general mental 
grasp, and in special criticism of this Gospel, as be- 
yond all comparison greater than Strauss. 


With Baur and those who more or less closely 
followed him, it will be my duty to deal in the next 
lecture. 


LECTURE V 


‘OUR AGE’ 


BAUR: THE TUBINGEN SCHOOL. OTHER NEGATIVE 
THEORIES 


THESE PROFESSORS ARE UNDER STRONG TEMPTATIONS TO PRODUCE 
NEW THEORIES IN BIBLICAL CRITICISM, THEORIES MARKED BY VIGOUR AND 
RIGOUR; AND FOR THIS PURPOSE TO ASSUME THAT THINGS CAN BE KNOWN 
WHICH CANNOT, TO TREAT POSSIBILITIES AS IF THEY WERE CERTAINTIES, 
TO MAKE SYMMETRY WHERE ONE DOES NOT FIND IT, AND SO TO LAND 
BOTH THE TEACHER, AND THE LEARNER WHO TRUSTS TO HIM, IN THE 
MOST FANCIFUL AND UNSOUND CONCLUSIONS. THERE ARE FEW WHO DO 
NOT SUCCUMB TO THEIR TEMPTATIONS, AND BAUR, I THINK, HAS SUC= 
CUMBED TO THEM. 

“EVEN WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING THE LEARNING, TALENT, AND SERVICES 
OF THESE CRITICS, | INSIST UPON THEIR RADICAL FAULTS; BECAUSE, AS 
OUR TRADITIONAL THEOLOGY BREAKS UP, GERMAN CRITICISM OF THE BIBLE 
IS LIKELY TO BE STUDIED HERE MORE AND MORE, AND TO THE UN- 
TRAINED READER ITS VIGOROUS AND RIGOROUS THEORIES ARE, IN MY 
OPINION, A REAL DANGER. THEY IMPOSE UPON HIM BY THEIR BOLDNESS 
AND NOVELTY. TO HIS PRACTICAL HOLD ON THE BIBLE THEY CONDUCE 
NOTHING, BUT RATHER DIVERT FROM IT; AND YET THEY ARE OFTEN 
FARTHER FROM THE TRUTH, ALL THE WHILE, THAN EVEN THE TRADITIONAL 
VIEW WHICH THEY PROFESS TO ANNIHILATE.’ 

Matthew Arnold, 


LECTURE V. 


And not even so did their witness agree together.—Mark xiv. 59. 


Wuew the theological world was startled by the 
appearance of Strauss’s Life of Jesus, there was at 
least one man to whom it caused no_ surprise. 
Ferdinand Christian Baur foresaw what was coming 
from his former pupil, and he had often spoken to 
him about it. The results of his own more matured 
judgment were given to the world after those of 
Strauss, and he naturally occupies a later place in our 
studies ; but he was by sixteen years an older man. 
The son of a Wiirtemberg village pastor, born at 
Schmieden, near Stuttgart, in 1792, he came to Blau- 
beuren when only eight years old, his father having 
been appointed to the office of deacon of the parish. 
At the age of thirteen he, too, went to the seminary 
there; and afterwards to the University of Tiibingen. 
You will remember, perhaps, from our study of 
Strauss how close the connexion between the little 
seminary and the university was; how, when Strauss 
went to Blaubeuren, he had Baur to teach him ; and 
how in Tiibingen he was again the pupil of the newly- 
made professor. Baur inherited and adopted the 


The new 
Ttibingen 
school. 


Baur, 
1792— 
1860. 


Evangeli- 
cal sym- 
pathies, 


Influenced 
by Schlei- 
ermacher 
and Hegel. 


Work at 
Blau- 
beuren 
and Tiib- 
ingen. 


224 LECTURE V. 


evangelical traditions of both school and university.' 
His first published work was an essay on Kaiser’s δὲ}- 
lical Theology in Bengel’s Archives,’ and so little did he 
openly break with the current views of the time and 
place, that he was not only Professor of Historical 
Theology, but also Regent of the Sut or hostel, 
which was the usual residence of Protestant students 
who were being trained for the ministry, and he took 
a warm interest in it to the day of his death. Like 
all foremost minds among theological students of that 
day, he was largely influenced by the teaching of 
Schleiermacher,* and the impulse of this master is felt 
in his first important work Symbolics and Mythology.’ 
Like Strauss, he passed from Schleiermacher to Hegel, 
and, like Strauss, he carried into all his after work, 
with unflinching adhesion, the principles of the 
Hegelian Left. Unlike Strauss, his life was one 
great whole. He spent nearly sixty years at Blau- 
beuren and Tiibingen, and for more than thirty 
years, that is, from 1826 to 1860, fulfilled the duties 
of his professorship with consistent devotion. The 
chair, you will remember, was that of Historical 
Theology, and to this subject, in all the length and 
breadth of its extent, the energy of his rarely equalled 
powers was devoted. Few men ever worked so 


' Cf. Dr. Karl Kliipfel’s Ge- wards, pp. 389-457, are by Baur. 
schichte und Beschreibung der 2 Archiv fiir Theologie, 11. 656. 
UOniversitiét Tiibingen, 1849. The 3 Cf. Lecture VI. p. 300. 
sections on the Evangelical Theo- 4 Die Symbolik und Mythologie, 
logical Faculty and the Evan- oder die Naturreligion des Alter- 
gelical Seminary, from Storr on- thums, 3 vols., 1824-5. 


LECTURE V. 225 


hard ; four o’clock in the morning, winter and 
summer, was his hour for rising. Few men ever 
produced so much. Few men ever attained, and 
fewer have preserved, so high a standard of excel- 
lence. He is not, like Strauss, carried away, and he 
does not carry his readers away, by the mere beauty 
of thought or form. I doubt whether his readers are 
often carried away at all. It is for ordinary people 
hard enough work to keep up with him. [Ὁ is some- 
times not unlike walking across a ploughed field. 
It is a ploughed field. He has been working at 
virgin soil, has been right through it from end to 
end, and has turned over every inch of the ground ; 
but the walking is not very easy, and some of us 
may well be thankful to men stronger than ourselves 
who have walked in front of us, and have here and 
there made paths across it. 

Let us look for a moment at the extent of the 
field in which this one man has done pioneer 
work. I have already referred to an important early 
book. The following is a list of his other writings 
in chronological order. It is probably not quite 
complete, but is sufficiently so for our purpose :— 


1. On the Derivation of 3. On the Opposition be- 
Lbinitism, or the Christ-Party | tween Protestantism and Catho- 


at Corinth. licism, in answer to Mohler’s 
2. On Mancheism.® Symbolics." 
° Die Christuspartet in der ko- ® Geschichte des Manichiiismus, 


rinthischen Gemeinde u.s.w., Zett- 1831. 
schrift fiir Theologie, 1831, iv. 61, 7 Gegensatz des Katholicismus 
and 1836, iv. 1. und des Protestantismus, 1834. 


Q 


Extent of 
his lite- 
rary work. 


Books, 


226 


4. On Christian Gnosis, or 
the Christian Philosophy of 
Religion.§ 

5. On the so-called Pasto- 
ral Epistles of the Apostle 
Paul.? 

6. Time and Occasion of the 
Kipistle to the Romans.! 

7. On the Origin of the 
Episcopate.” 

8. History of the Doctrine 
of the Atonement.? 

9. History of the Doctrine 
of the Trinity and the Incarna- 
tion of God (8 vols.).4 

10. Paul the Apostle of 
Jesus Christ.’ 

11. Critical Examination of 
the Canonical Gospels, their 
Relation to each other, their 
Origin and Character 6 


8 Die christliche Gnosis, oder 
die christliche Religionsphilosophie, 
1835. 

9 Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe 
des Apostels Paulus u.s.w., 1835. 

' Ueber Zweck wu. Veranlassung 
des Rimerbriefs u.s.w., Zeitschrift 
fiir Theologie, 1836, iii. 59. 

* Ueber den Ursprung des Epi- 
scopats, 1838. 

3 Geschichte der Lehre von der 
Versihnung, 1838. 

* Geschtchte der Lehre von der 
Dreieinigkeit und Menschwerdung 
Gottes, 1841-3, 3 vols. 

> Paulus der Apostel 
Christi, 1845 and 1866. 

© Kritische Untersuchungen tiber 


Jesu 


LECTURE V. 


12. Manual of the History 
of Dogmas ;* enlarged in the 
posthumous 

13. Lectures on the History 
of Christian Dogmas.® 

14. The Gospel of Mark.® 

15. On the Lpochs of 
Church History.} 

16. Church History of the 


First Three Centuries.” 


And the important post- 
humous works: 


17. Church History from 
the Fourth to the Siath Cen- 
tury.* 

18. Church 
Middle Ages.* 

19. Modern 


tory.” 


History of the 


Church His- 


die kanonischen Evangelien u.s.w., 
1847. 

7 Lehrbuch der christlichen Dog- 
mengeschichte, 1847. 

8 Vorlesungen tiber die christliche 
Dogmengeschichte, 1865-7, 3 vols. 

9. Das Marcusevangeliwm, 1851. 

1 Die Epochen der kirchlichen 
Geschichtschreibung, 1852. 

2 Die christliche Kirche der drei 
ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853. 

3 Die christliche Kirche vom 
Aten bis zum G6ten Jahrhundert, 
1859. 

4 Die christliche Kirche des Mit- 
telalters, 1861. 

> Die christliche 
neuern Zeit, 1863. 


Kirche der 


LECTURE V. 


20. Church History of the 
Nineteenth Century.® 


227 


21. Lectures on the Theo- 
logy of the New Testament. 


Besides these there were numerous articles in the 
Tiibingen Review, τὰ Zeller’s Year-book, and, after 


1857, in Hilgenfeld’s Revew. 


Some of these shorter 


writings are of primary importance for our own 


study ; for example :— 


22. On the Composition and 
Character of the Johannine 
Gospel.§ 

23. The Johannine KHpis- 
tles.° 

24. Introduction to the New 
Testament. 

25. The Johannine Ques- 
tion and the Latest Answers.? 

26. Answer to Dr. Karl 
Hase’s Letter on the Tiibingen 
School. 

27. On 


Johannine 


Ques- 


ὁ Die christliche Kirche des 19ten 
Jahrhunderts, 1862, ed. 2, 1877. 

7 Vorlesungen wber neutesta- 
mentliche Theologie, 1864. 

8 Ueber die Composition und den 
Charakter des Johanneischen Evan- 
gelium, Theologische Jahrbiicher, 
1844. 

9. Die Johanneische Briefe u.s.w., 
Theol. Jahrb., 1848. 

1 Die Hinleitung wm das Neue 
Testament u.s.w., Theol. Jahrb., 
1850, 1851. 

* Die Johanneische Frage αι. ihre 
neuesten Beantwortungen, Theol. 
Jahrb., 1854. 


tions: Justin Martyr and the 
Paschal Controversy. 

28. Reply to Dr. Steitz on 
the Paschal Controversy of the 
Karly Church. 

29. The Tiibingen School 
and its Present Position, a 
Reply to Weisse, Weizsécker, 
and Hwald,® the second edi- 
tion of which appeared but a 
short time before the author’s 
death. 


> An Herrn Dr. Karl Hase 
wU.s.w., Beantwortung des Send- 
schreibens—die Tiibinger Schule, 
1855. 

* Zur Johanneischen Frage : 1. 
Ueber Justin d. M. gegen Luthardt. 
2. Ueber den Paschastreit gegen 
Steitz, Theol. Jahrb., 1857. 

° Entgegnung gegen Herrn Dr. 
G. ΕἸ. Steitz tiber den Paschastreit 
der alten Kirche, Zeitsch. f. wiss. 
Theol., 1858. 

ὁ Die Tiibinger Schule wu. ihre 
Stellung zur Gegenwart, 1859, ed. 
2, 1860. 


and 
shorter 
writings. 


Baur’s me- 
thod of 
investiga- 
tion. 


228 LECTURE V. 


There is the field. Where are the paths across 
it? Baur has himself made one such path in his 
sketch of Church History in the Nineteenth Century,‘ 
which was edited after his death by Dr. Zeller. It 
is little to the credit of English theology that, while 
so much of Strauss was soon translated, no work 
of Baur’s appeared in English until, by the aid of the 
Theological Translation Fund,* Paul the Apostle was 
translated in 1873-5, and The Church History of the 
First Three Centuries in 1878-9. These are both paths 
that we may safely walk on. The Paul the Apostle 
is, aS we shall see, a necessity for the understanding 
of Baur’s work. The First Three Centuries is his own 
summary of his chief positions. The second German 
edition of this work was published in the year in 
which he died. The English translation is from the 
third edition issued three years afterwards, and it 
therefore represents in convenient form the author’s 
latest views. 

Baur arrived at his criticism of the Fourth Gospel 
by an altogether different road from that of Strauss. 
He had commenced his investigations long before his 
pupil. His studies of the two Corinthian Epistles 
first led him to a careful examination of the Apostle 
Paul’s relation to the older Apostles. He was con- 
vinced that the Epistles themselves gave sufficient 
data for concluding that the older and commonly 
accepted view of an entire harmony must be 


7 Die christliche Kirche, ut supra, 1862 and 1877. 
8 Theological Translation Fund Library, 1873, ete. 


LECTURE V. 229 


abandoned, and that there was really an opposition 
which went so far that the Jewish Christians ques- 
tioned δ. Paul’s authority. A more exact examination 
of the pseudo-Clementine Homilies, which he, fol- 
lowing Neander, brought into prominence as im- 
portant for the earliest history, left him with a deeper 
impression of the significance of this opposition in 
the post-Apostolic period. And it became more and 
more clear that the opposition of the two parties, the 
Pauline and the Petrine or Judaistic—which must, 
he thinks, be distinguished much more sharply than 
has hitherto been done, in both the Apostolic and 
post-Apostolic period—had a marked influence not 
only on the form of the Petrine speeches, but also on 
the composition of the Acts of the Apostles. The 
first results of these investigations he published in 
the Tiibingen Review in 1831." 

His examination of the doctrine of Gnosis led him 
to the Pastoral Epistles, with the result that, in 1835, 
he published his reasons for believing that they were 
not the work of the Apostle Paul, but that they 
sprung from the same party tendency which, in the 
second century, was the ruling formative principle of 
the Church. Continued occupation with the Pauline 
Epistles, and a deeper steeping in the spirit of the 
Apostles and of Pauline Christianity, fixed more and 
more the opinion that there was an essential difference 
between the four chief Epistles of 5. Paul and the 


° Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Cf. Tuibinger Zeitschrift fiir Theo- 
Jahrhunderts, ed. 2, 1877, p. 417. —logie, 1831, 4tes Heft. 


Pauline 
and Pe- 
trine 

parties. 


Four 
Pauline 
Epistles. 


At first 
took no 
part in the 
‘ Johan- 
nine ques- 
tion.’ 


Consi- 
dered it to 
be a‘tend- 
ency- 
writing.’ 


230 LECTURE V. 


shorter ones, and that the authenticity of several, if 
not all, of these latter was very doubtful. These re- 
sults he carried out and published in his treatise on 
Paul the Apostle, quite independently of Strauss. 

He had now brought into the field of history a 
period which by dogmatic prepossession had been up 
to this time excluded from it. Admit Ebionitism and 
Paulinism as the factors of the historic formation of 
this period, and all is clear. And, in spite of oppos- 
ing voices, he believes he is justified in affirming that 
the old and groundless views of the closed unity of 
the Canon were for ever destroyed.’ 

Thus ended the first period of Baur’s critical 
labours. 


When Strauss’s Life of Jesus appeared, Baur re- 
mained during the general agitation a silent observer. 
He knew all about it before it was published, as we 
have seen, but he refrained from taking any part in 
the discussion, because he had not yet made the deeper 
studies which he felt to be necessary. But when he 
had made the Johannine Gospel the subject of a course 
of lectures, he felt himself able to introduce a new 
and independent position with regard to the evan- 
gelical history. The fundamental distinction of this 
Gospel from the Synoptics was so convincing, that 
he at once formed the opinion that it also was a 
‘tendency-writing,’ the earliest possible date for which 
was A.D. 160, and he published this opinion in the 


1 Kirchengeschichte, ut supra, pp. 117, 118. 


LECTURE V. 51 


Theological Year-book for 1844. There he felt was 
a new platform gained for the criticism of the evan- 
gelical history. If the Fourth Gospel is no historical 
writing like the others, if it has undoubtedly an ideal 
tendency, then it can no longer be placed by the side 
of the Synoptics, and opposed to them. The Straussian 
tactics and method of operation—to slay on the one 
hand the Synoptics by John, and on the other hand 
John by the Synoptics, with the result that no one 


knows when to stop—are no more possible.’ Baur is 
careful to add that he does not mean to assert that we 
have in the Synoptics a purely historical presentation, 
but that we have in them an altogether different. his- 
torical basis from that which we have in John.* But 
the question then presents itself to him, If once one 
of the Canonical Gospels is shown to be a tendency- 
writing of avery definite kind, ought not one or more 
of the Synoptic Gospels to be placed in the same 
category ? This leads to a fuller examination of the 
Gospel of Luke, which was published in the Theolo- 
gical Year-book for 1846.° These investigations of the 
Gospels were united in one volume in 1847, and this 
formed the second chief work on the criticism of the 
New Testament.® 

The narrower the circle is thus made in which 


2 Theologische Jahrbiicher. Tii- 212 sqq. 
bingen, 1844. * Kirchengeschichte, ut supra, 
3 Cf. Strauss’s objection to this ρ. 419. 
statement by Baur, Leben Jesu fiir ° Theologische Jahrbiicher, 1846. 
das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, 1864, 5 Kritische Untersuchungen, ut 
pp. 61 sqq.; and Lecture IV. pp. supra, 1847. 


Applica- 
tion 


of the 
principle 
to the 
‘mythical 
theory.’ 


Combina- 
tion of 
results. 


52 LECTURE V. 


the original tradition of the Gospels is to be sought, 
the simpler and easier, in Baur’s opinion, becomes 
the business of the critic. The whole question is 
now centred in the Matthew Gospel. The widely 
extended mythical theory of Strauss is reduced 
to narrow dimensions. Once make it certain that 
some of our Canonical Gospels are to be regarded as 
‘tendency-writings,’ and the question arises whether, 
where hitherto myth has been supposed to be neces- 
sary, the tradition has been modified in the interest 
of the author’s literary tendency, or else is pure 
fiction. As the tendency, which must be recognized 
to be the specific character of some of the Gospels, can 
have its ground only in the peculiar circumstances 
in which their authors wrote, that is, in the party 
divisions which existed among them, so the stand- 
point for the criticism of the Gospels is to be found 
only in the whole sphere in which such phenomena 
manifest themselves. We must not draw the his- 
torical circle too narrow, and it is obvious how 
important if is, not orly in the Apostolic, but also 
in the post-Apostolic period, to take cognizance of 
everything which can give more exact knowledge 
of the different directions in which divisions took 
place. 

These investigations of the Gospels naturally 
attach themselves to the earlier conclusions from the 
Pauline Epistles. There is the foundation and firm 
support. On the other hand, the post-Apostolic 
periods, of which our Canonical Gospels are the pro- 


LECTURE V. 233 


ducts, contribute to the presentation of a clearer and 
concrete form.‘ 


There are three stages of the development :— 

The first period extends to the destruction of 
Jerusalem in Α.Ὁ. 70. The documents are, the First 
and Second Epistles to the Corinthians, Galatians, 
Romans—these four and only these four being 


genuine Pauline Epistles—-and the Apocalypse, which 
is certainly the work of J ohn, ὁ and represents an origi- 
nal Ebionite Christianity i in opposition to Paulinism. 

The second period extends from a.p. 70 to 140. 
The documents are, first the Gospels of Matthew and 
Luke, which belong to the Jewish wars under Ha- 
drian, then the Acts of the Apostles, the Gospel of 
Mark, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pseudo- 
Pauline Epistles, and finally the Catholic Epistles. 
The characteristics of this period are the first en- 
deavours on both sides towards moderating the 
antagonism. The Jewish Christians no longer in- 
sisted upon the requirements of circumcision. The 
Pauline party were anxious to heal the breach, and 
hence sprung the Epistles to the Ephesians and 
Colossians. 

The third period extends from a.p. 140. The 
extremes of the Ebionites on the one hand, and of the 
Gnostics on the other were now abandoned. This is 
marked in practice by the Roman church and the 
watchword ‘Peter and Paul,’ and in idea by the 


7 Kirchengeschichte, wt supra, p. 420. 


Three 
stages : 
(1) to A.D: 
70. 

The docu- 
ments. 


(2) A.D. 
70-140. 
The docu- 
ments. 


(3) From 
A.D. 140. 
The docn- 
ments. 


234 LECTURE V. 


Fourth Gospel. The documents of this period are 
the Pastoral Epistles and the Johannine Gospel and 
Epistles.® 

The Jo- The Johannine Gospel is represented as being 

τ ~ most clearly of all the result of a deliberate second- 
century purpose. On both the great questions of 
theological discussion which troubled the Church in 
the second century, Gnosticism and the Paschal con- 
troversy, it is an obvious re-writing of the original 
evangelic tradition from a point of view which repre- 
sents in time, A.D. 160 or 170, and in place Asia Minor, 
or more probably Alexandria. The authenticity of the 
Gospel is, indeed, for Baur not the main question. 
The tendency and the character of the writing are 
essential to his position. 

Followers Nor did Baur stand alone as Strauss did. The 

of Baur: chief teacher in the University of Tiibingen had 
attracted an enthusiastic circle of disciples, and these 
formed a cluster around him, each one taking his own 
special line, and all contributing to the strength of 
the master’s position. A title which had formerly 
belonged to the leaders of evangelical pietism was, 
from local connexion, naturally transferred to them, 
and this new Tiibingen school became an important 
factor in the theological history of the nineteenth 
century. A course of lectures would be needed for 
even an outline of its history. I shall not attempt it 
in a small part of one. Let me only remind you 
that the group was illumined by the brilliancy of 


8. Cf. Holtzmann, H. J., Hinleitung, ed. 2, 1886, pp. 188 sq. 


LECTURE V. 


bo 
oN) 
Or 


Albert Schwegler, who had already prepared the way 
by a history of Montanism,’ and by criticisms on 
Liicke and Bruno Bauer,' and now presented to the 
world the first graphic, perhaps too graphic, account 
of the master’s teaching ;” that it was supported in 
its earlier years, though not without criticism, by the 
grave and solid learning of Albrecht Ritschl, who 
contributed works on Zhe (Gospel of Marcion and 
the Canonical Gospel of Luke,’ and the Origin of the 
Old Catholic Church ;* by the prolific Adolf Hilgen- 
feld, now Professor at Jena, and editor, from its 
commencement in 1857, of the Journal for Scientific 
Theology which bears his name,’ who wrote early 
works on The Clementine Recognitions and Homilies.® 
The Gospel and Epistle of John,’ The Gospel of Mark,’ 
Primitive Christianity,? and is now, perhaps, best 
known by his valuable Introduction to the New Testa- 
' by the Tiibingen colleague, Késtlin, who 
wrote On the Johannine System of Doctrine,” and On 
the Origin and Composition of the Synoptic Gospels, 


ment 5 


° Der Montanismus und die 
christliche Kirche des 2ten Jahr- 
hunderts, 1841. 


δ Die clementinischen Recogni- 
tionen und Homilien, 1848. 
7 Das Evangelium und die Briefe 


1 Theologische Jahrbiicher, 1842. 

2 Das nachapostolische Zeitalter 
in den Hauptmomenten seiner 
Entwicklung, 2 vols. 1845-1846. 

3 Das Evangelium Marcions 
und das kanonische Evangelium 
des Inwas, 1846. 

4 Die Entstehung der altkatho- 
lischen Kirche, 1850. 

> Zeitschrift fir 
liche Theologie. 


wissenschaft- 


Johannis nach ihrem Lehrbegriff, 
1849. 

8 Das Marcusevangelium, 1850. 

° Das Urchristenthum, 1855. 

1 Historisch-kritische Einleitung 
an das Neue Testament, 1875. 

* Der Lehrbegriff des Evange- 
lhumsund der Briefe Johannis, 1843. 

5 Der Ursprung und die Kompo- 
sition der synoptischen Evangelien, 
1853. 


Schwegler, 
1819_- 
1857. 


Ritschl, 
1822- 
1889. 


Hilgen- 
feld, 
1823- 


Kostlin, 
1819— 


Volkmar, 
1809- 


Holsten, 
1825- 


Zeller, 
1814- 


236 LECTURE V. 


and also did good service in the reviews ;* by the 
Ziirich professor, Volkmar, whose special work in re- 
lation to the earlier days of the school was to meet 
objections from quotations in Marcion, Justin, and 
the Clementines, and afterwards to represent its ex- 
treme Left ;° by the Heidelberg professor, Holsten, 
who came later into the field and has devoted his 
thoughts chiefly to the special position of Pauline 
theology ;° and, chief of all the early band, though he 
in later years, like Schwegler, retired from the teach- 
ing of theology to undertake that of philosophy, came 
the Berlin professor, Eduard Zeller, Baur’s pupil at 
Blaubeuren and Tiibingen, and afterwards his son- 
in-law, the friend, editor, and biographer of Strauss, 
editor of portions of Baur’s works, editor from 1842 
to 1857 of the Theological Year-book * which bears his 
name, and contributor of some of the chief articles ὃ 


4 Theologische Jahrbiicher, 1850, 
1851. 

° Das Evangelium Marcions, 
1852 ; Ueber Justin den Médrtyrer, 
1853; Hin new entdecktes Zeug- 
miss: Theologische  Jahrbiicher, 
1854, pp. 446-462 ; Die Religion 
Jesu, 1857, cap. viii. ; Der Ursprung 
unserer EHvangelien, 1866, pp. 
91-110. 

ὁ Zum Evangelium des Paulus 
und des Petrus, 1868; Das Evan- 
geliwm des Paulus, 1881 ; Die drer 
urspriinglichen noch wngeschrie- 
benen Evangelien, 1883. 

7 Theologische Jahrbiicher, 1842— 
1857. 

® See especially Die diusseren 
Zeugnisse tiber das Dasein und den 


Ursprung des vierten Evangeliums, 
1845, pp. 577-656. (The Fourth 
Gospel cannot be traced back 
beyond a.p. 170.)  Hinige wei- 
tere Bemerkungen ἰδοὺ die 
diussere Bezeugung des vierten 
Evangeliums, 1847, pp. 136-174. 
Ueber die Citate aus dem vierten 
Evangelium in den Philos Origenis, 
1853, pp. 144-152. Noch ein 
Wort wiber den Ausspruch Jesu 
bei Justin Apol., i. 61, 1855, pp. 
138-140. And four important 
articles—Das Urchristenthum, Die 
Tiibinger historische Schule, Ferdi- 
nand Christian Baur, Strauss und 
Renan—reprinted in Vortrdge wnd 
Abhandlungen, 2nd ed. 1875. 


LECTURE V. 237 


in it, author of a short History of the Church,’ and of 
a treatise on the Acts of the Apostles,’ which, apart 
from its special theories, is a work of ripe and careful 
scholarship and of permanent value. 

Never was theory supported by more learning, 
ability, or enthusiasm. Never did theory more en- 
tirely collapse. If we look at it we shall, 1 think, 
find little difficulty in explaining the failure. 

The foundations of Baur’s edifice are the principles 
of the Hegelian Left, for, like many another disciple of 
Hegel, the moment he had embraced these principles 
he was fettered by them. The wonderful skill and 
untiring work of which I have spoken was, after all, 
slave-labour. His field is cultivated as field hardly 
ever was, but it is in the narrow valley in which 
the master placed him. Mentally, as well as physi- 
cally, he never left Tiibingen ; he never got beyond 
his work, so as to look at it from without; and a 
stripling who will ascend the hills on either side can 
see this giant working in his narrow valley as though 
it were the universe; while mountain rises above 
mountain and beyond the horizon there are hills and 
valleys of which none of us have ever thought, in 
the vast infinity of the universe of God. But the 
Hegelian trichotomy draws the limit beyond which 
Baur cannot go. Thesis, antithesis, momentum, 
higher unity——this is the law which is to explain all 


° Geschichte der christlichen ihrem Inhalt wnd Ursprung kri- 
Kirche, 1848. tisch untersucht, 1854. 
1 Die Apostelgeschichte nach 


Baur 

bound by 
the Hege- 
lian Left. 


Develop- 
ment of 
philo- 
sophy. 


Baur’s 
theory an 
arch, 


238 LECTURE V. 


things in heaven and earth, and the waters which are 
above and beneath them. 

Meanwhile philosophy has been claiming its own 
development, and has asserted that Hegel is not its 
last prophet. This assertion has perhaps been made 
more loudly in Germany than in England. It has 
been said that there are more Hegelians in Oxford 
than there are in Berlin. It has been said that Oxford 
is the happy place to which good German philoso- 
phies hope to go—after they are dead ; but this was 
by anenemy. The life at Oxford is too vigorous to 
be affected by anything which is dead. But other 
places and persons are not always so blessed, and the 
corpses of not a few dead theories have lately been 
sent about the country ; and, now galvanized by 
science, now wire-pulled in ignorance like puppets 
are at country fairs, have seemed to be actually alive ; 
and they have greatly terrified a good many innocent 
country people, and children of all ages who knew 
nothing about the batteries and could not see the 
wires. 

But whatever may be the present vitality of the 
Hegelian philosophy, of which I will not venture to 
speak, except to say that many of us at least have 
still much to learn from it in its own proper sphere, 
there can, I think, be little doubt about the edifice 
which the Tiibingen school reared upon it. This 
edifice forms, let us remember, an arch. Every 
stone of the arch supports and is supported by its 
neighbour. The foundations on either side are, on 


LECTURE V. 239 


the right, the four undoubted Pauline Epistles and 
the Apocalypse, dated before the year a.p. 70— 
there is your thesis, definite and fixed: on the left, 
Matthew and Luke, dated a.p. 1380-140 — there 
your antithesis, equally definite and equally fixed. 
Then come the stones on either side: Acts, Mark, 
Hebrews, pseudo-Pauline letters, Catholic letters, 
Ephesians, Colossians. The pseudo - Clementines 
must have a place, for they suggested the whole 
thing, and show a middle stage of progress ; the 
pastoral Epistles are so late that they come near the 
top of the arch; and finally, as the last stage of 
the development, the crown to which all leads on 
either side, the key which binds all together in 
unbroken and unbreakable unity,—the Johannine 
Gospel and Epistles. 

All this is very wonderful. It is like the struc- 
tures one has seen inadream. It is like the castle 
made of wooden blocks of stone in the nursery. It 
will hold together as long as you leave it alone, but 
you must not touch it to see if the stones are real. 
You would not be so cruel. They please the child. 
And were this structure simply a chapter in a novel, 
or a plan drawn upon paper, you would not touch it ; 
but it is an arch over which you are asked to walk, 
and the abyss below is deeper than youcan see. And 
when you begin to think of what these stones are, 
of the quarries from which they came, of their shape 
and size—for most of us after all do know. something 
about the individual stones—you first wonder by what 


The arch 
tested. 


The foun- 
dations 
doubted. 


The work- 
men ques- 
tioned : 


240 LECTURE V. 

possible skill and contrivance they have found their 
place in this arch. There are some of the workmen 
about still, and we can ask them to explain the whole 


thing to us. But no, let us not put questions, or 


perhaps they will say by-and-by that they did not 


understand us, and that their answers therefore mean 
nothing. Let us take out our note-books and listen, 
and we may hear a good deal. ‘There is a group 
looking at the foundation on which the first stones 
rest. They are not quite sure that it is all rock ; 
indeed, there are serious signs of fissure and col- 
lapse. The Tiibingen Schelling has been lecturing at 
Berlin in place of the Tiibingen Hegel, and though 
Baur regarded the whole Schelling episode as a piece 
of excellent comedy,’ it is surprising how able men 
believe in it. Trendelenburg has followed ; Herbart 
and Lotze have been lecturing at Gottingen; Ulrici 
at Halle. Strange things have been said by the 
younger Fichte and others in the Journal for Philo- 
sophy.2 What does it all mean? Can it be that 
Hegel is after all human clay, though it be of a 
very fine quality, and not eternal rock? But look, 
they say, at the enormous weight of this arch ; 
nothing short of rock can possibly bear it. 

And there is Volkmar. We know what a clever 
workman he is, and how if we consult some pages 


2 *Das ganze Auftreten Schel- 
ling’s in Berlin war ein wahrhaft 
komisches Schauspiel, das mit 
grossem Gepriinge aufgefiihrt 
wurde. Kine Hauptrolle spielte 
dabei Neander.’ Kirchengeschichte 


des 19ten Jahrhunderts, ed. 2, 
1877, p. 405. 

3 Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie, 
founded in 1837 to oppose He- 
gelianism. 


LECTURE V. 241 
of modern English writing—he is not now perhaps 
so much quoted in Germany—he appears as a chief 
authority on this arch. He is carefully measuring that 
big foundation stone on the left. What! there surely 
cannot be anything wrong there! But he is very 
much afraid there is. It is a thousand pities, for the 
whole process of development depends upon it. Yes! 
it is in the wrong place, it must come out. He has 
talked to a good many of his friends and they, espe- 
cially Késtlin, agree with him.* The original Gospel 
is a primitive Mark,” and the date is probably a.p. 73. 

There is Hilgenfeld, a workman who has done an 
enormous amount of good work on the arch itself 
He is left in a sort of perma- 


As 


one of the original workmen, and now getting on for 


and round about it. 
nent charge and is a thoroughly honest man. 


seventy years of age, anything he says is valuable, 
and if you listen you will have no difficulty in hear- 
ing a good deal, for he often talks about it. Look, 
he is now examining the foundation stone on the 
right. He says it is not quite safe. There are some 
awkward holes about it which must be filled up. 
First Thessalonians and Philippians and Philemon 
have by mistake been put in the wrong places, and 


must be taken out and put in here. Then he looks at 


4 Kostlin, Κα. R., Der Ursprung 
und die Komposition der synopti- 
schen Hvangelien, 1853. See esp. 
pp. 310-385. 

° Volkmar, Die Religion Jesu 
und ihre erste Hntwickelung, 1857 ; 
Der Ursprung wnserer Evangelien, 


1866 ; Marcus wnd die Synopses, 
u.s.w., 1869, 2te Aufl. 1876 ; Jesus 
Nazarenus, 1881 and 1882. See 
pp. 7 sq., and esp. the ‘Chro- 
nological Survey of the written 
sources of the Life of Jesus,’ on 
pp. 18 sqaq. 
R 


Volkmar, 


Hilgen- 
feld, 


Ritschl, 


242 LECTURE V. 


the foundation stone on the left. It is very serious. 
Volkmar is right. The architect was really alto- 
gether wrong. His foundation is impossible. But 
Volkmar is also wrong; it is not a Mark which is 
wanted. That comes second. The first stone is 
Matthew, which exactly tits the place, and it comes 
from the Apostle himself from about a.p. 50-60, 
though it was a little retouched between a.p. 70-80. 
Then he looks at the spring of the arch and the key- 
stone. These too will have to be altered. The 
Clementines are much too early. John is much too 
late. He has talked to a great many workmen and 
they all agree with him that the Clementines come 
after John, except one whose name he does not know, 
and he is not a German.® Altering the key-stone of 
an arch is a very dangerous matter, but this really 
cannot remain as it is.’ 

And there is—or rather we must say was, for he 
too has departed from us—the greatest workman of 
them all, Albrecht Ritschl. Hardly one of the regular 
workmen at any time, he built buttresses rather than 
the arch, but these gave the strength on which many 
rested. If you watch him, you will see that he has 
been pulling them down, and that the arch which 
had depended upon him is left without his strong 
support. Now that he has had time for further 

6 Cf. Lecture II. p. 84; and AHistorisch-kritische Hinleitwng in 
Lecture VII. pp. 374 sq. das Neue Testament, 1875; Zeit- 
7 Hilgenfeld, Die vangelien  schrift fiir wissenschaftliche Theo- 


nach ihrer Entstehung wnd ge-  logie, 1875, p. 582. 
schichtlichen Bedeutung, 1854 ; 


LECTURE V. 243 


testing, he thinks that John belongs to the founda- 
tion, not to the crown. 
Listen to him :— 


In order to prevent misunderstandings, I would explain 
that I consider the Gospel to be authentic, not only because 
the denial of its authenticity raises far greater difficulties 
than its acceptance, but also because the presentation of 
the revelation of Jesus in the three other Gospels requires for 
its completion the discourses in John.® 

Karl Holsten is almost the only other original 
workman, for Schwegler died many years since, 
after leaving this work, and Zeller long ago gave 
up arch-building of this kind. Holsten is said to 
have been the only faithful workman the architect 
had in his last days. He may have the plans and 
be able to put the whole right. But when we listen 
to him, we find that he also regards that left founda- 
tion stone as altogether wrong. It ought not to have 
been Ebionitism, it ought not to have been any one 
of the Canonical books. The only stone which will 
really fit the place and bear the structure is the 
gospel of Peter.” 


And now having looked at this arch, let us try to 


8 ‘Um Missdeutungen zu Ritschl, Die Entstehung der altka- 


begegnen, erklire ich, dass ich 
das Evangelium fiir echt halte, 
nicht nur, weil die Leugnung seiner 
Echtheit viel gréssere Schwierig- 
keiten darbietet, als deren Aner- 
kennung ; sondern auch weil die 
Darstellung der Verkiindigung 
Jesu nach den drei anderen Evan- 
gelien ihre Ergiinzung durch die 
_Reden bei Johannes _fordert.’ 


tholischen Kirche, 2te Aufl., 1857, 
pp. 48 sqq. See also Theologische 
Jalrbiicher, 1851, pp. 500 sqq., 
and esp. Jahrbiicher fiir Deutsche 
Theologie, 1861, pp. 429-459. 

® Holsten, Die drei urspriing- 
lichen noch ungeschriebenen Evan- 
gelien, 1883. Die synoptischen 
Evangelien nach der Form ihres 
Inhalts, 1885. See esp. pp. 165 sqq. 


RZ 


Holsten. 


The arch 
a ruin. 


French 
writers: 
Stap. 


244 LECTURE V. 


interpret it. It does not represent too strongly the 
adhesion of the whole system of Baur, or the way in 
which that system is builded together into one or- 
ganic whole ; and it is impossible to remove any one 
of the interdepending stones, much more to touch 
one of the foundations or the key of the system, 
without bringing the structure to the ground. It 
1165 before us, therefore, as a magnificent ruin, whose 
fall has been wrought by the tools of the builders 
themselves. A ruin, and therefore it is ignorance 
or worse than ignorance to speak of it in the pre- 
sent as a firm foundation on which we may in full 
confidence build our lives; but a magnificent ruin 
which no future architect can neglect to study, and 
from which he cannot fail to draw really great ideas, 
and from the stones of which have been gathered, 
and will be gathered, forms of fair and wondrous 
beauty, fit to take their place upon the eternal rock 
and to grace the temple of the Lord. 


Perhaps we ought also to note that the methods 
and results of the school were presented to French 
readers by M. A. Stap, a Belgian writer, in a series 
of articles in the Revue Germanique which were 
afterwards republished in his Historical and Critical 
Studies on the Sources of Christianity, in 1864. The 
fifth study deals with the Fourth Gospel, and presents 
it on the well-known principles of the school with 


1 Etudes historiques et critiques Paris, 1864 ; ed. 2, 1866, pp. 232- 
sur les Origines du Christianisme, 348. 


LECTURE" V2" 245 


little addition of fresh investigation or result. He 
finds everywhere a total absence of historical proba- 
bility, and proof that it is in the fullest sense a work 
of theology and not one of history. It was unknown 
in the Church until after a.p. 155, when it began to 
attract attention, and was not written before the 
time of Valentinus, that is, after A.p. 130-140. 

M. Gustave d’Eichthal, author of a considerable 
work on The Gospels,” is a disciple of the same school, 
and in a striking preface devotes some pages to the 
Johannine question. He lays special stress on the 
anti-Jewish and mystic tone, and on the connexion 
between the Gospel and Gnosticism, in which, as well 
as in the view of its date, he is avowedly a follower 
of Hilgenfeld. 

But neither of these French writers makes any 
material addition to the work of their German 
precursors. 


Before passing from the Tiibingen school, I should 
like, however, to present, not my own view of it, but 
that of two German writers, to whom I shall have to 
refer again,’ and whose competence to speak on any 
question of New Testament criticism is fully admitted. 

It is now more than forty years since the typically 
independent, and in the true sense freethinker, De 
Wette, wrote the following words :— 


It will perhaps disappoint many that I have not entered 
more fully into a refutation of Baur’s destructive criticism ; 


2 Les Evangiles, 1863. Seeesp. vol. i. Preface, pp. xxv sqq. 
3 Cf. Lecture VI. pp. 307 and 319. 


D’Eich- 
thal, 1804- 


German 
criticism 
of the 
Tiibingen 
school : 


De Wette, 


Meyer. 


The 
Partition 
Theories. 


246 LECTURE V. 


but, on the one hand, this would have taken more space than 
I have at my command, and, on the other hand, I hold such 
a refutation to be superfluous. Such extravagant criticism 15 
self-destructive, and its only value is that, by exceeding all 
limits, it must awaken the feeling of the necessity of self- 
restraint.* 


And it is a quarter of a century ago since Meyer, 
the late veteran of New Testament commentators, 
summed up as follows the chief negative theories of 
that day :— 


We older men have already seen the time when Dr. 
Paulus and his inventions were in vogue; he died, and no 
disciple remained. We lived through the Strauss storm 
thirty years ago, and in what loneliness might the author now 
celebrate his jubilee. We saw the Tiibingen constellation 
arise, and even before Baur departed hence the brightness 
had waned. A renewed and firmer basis of the truth which 
had been attacked, and a more complete recognition of it, 
were the blessings which the wave left behind ; and so will it 
be after the present surge.° 


Side by side with the negative criticism of Evan- 
son, Bretschneider, Strauss, and Baur, and extending 
indeed from the earliest days of the modern doubts 
about the Fourth Gospel until the present time, a line 
of writers has existed, more or less connected with 
each other, and more or less fully holding that por- 
tions of the Gospel are authentic, but that it is not 
as a whole the work of 5. John. Among the first 


4 Kurzgefasstes exegetischesHand- Aufl. p. vii. Cf. Eng. ed. of 18735’ 
buch: Apostelgeschichte, 1848, 3te Preface by Dr. Dickson, pp. viil 
Aufli., Preface v, vi. and xii; and Lecture VI. pp. 319 

° Kommentar, Romer, 1865, 4te 566. 


LECTURE V. 247 


to express this view at the close of the last century 
was Jacob ©. R. Eckermann,® who thought the 
most remarkable discourses were Johannine, and the 
connecting history was by one of his friends, but 
Christoph 
Friedrich von Ammon, in the Erlangen Programme 
of 1811, sought to show ‘that John the author of 
the Gospel is a different person from the editor.’ 
Heinrich E. G. Paulus? thought John was witness 
and guarantee of the Gospel, but the author was a 
disciple—that it was composed and arranged by one 
of the later Christians who was a hearer of John’s, 
and perhaps a disciple of the Gnostic philosophy.! 
Dr. Christian Hermann Weisse, who was a pro- 
fessor of philosophy at Leipzig, gave this line of 


he afterwards retracted this opinion.’ 


criticism a more prominent position. He was a jurist 
and a disciple of Hegel, and at first a friend of 
Strauss, who speaks, however, of these works as 
showing the mixture of sound criticism and dilet- 
tante idiosyncrasies which characterized the whole 


standpoint of Weisse.? The discourses of Jesus and 


ὃ Theologische Beitriige, 1796, 9 Review of Bretschneider’s 


Ueber die sichern Griinde des Glau- 
bens, Bd. v. st. 2, p. 147. Cf. 
Rettig, Ephemerides exeyetico-theo- 
logice, 1824, fasc. ii. pp. 57 and 
95. Cf. Lucke, Commentar, 1840, 
p-.91. 

7 Erklirung aller dunkeln Stellen 
des Neuen Testaments, 1807, vol. ii. 

8 ‘*Docetur, Johannem Evan- 
gelii auctorem ab editore hujus 
libri diversum.’ Cf. Liicke, Com- 
mentar, 1840, Th. i. p. 97. 


Probabilia in Heidelberger Jahr- 
biicher der Literatwr, 1821, pp. 
112-142, and of Liicke’s Com- 
meniar, ibid. pp. 227-261. 

' *Qompositum esse et digestum 
a sericri Christiano, Joannis au- 
ditori, forsitan gnosticz dedito 
philosophie.’ Cf. Rettig, ut supra, 
Fasc. il. pp. 83 sq. 

* Leben Jesu fiir das deutsche 
Volk, 1864,: p. 36; cf. Hase, 
Geschichte Jesu, 1876, pp. 129 sq. 


Ecker- 
mann, 
1754— 
1837. 


Ammon, 
1766— 
1850. 


Paulus, 
1761- 
1851. 


Weisse, 
1801~- 
1866. 


Schenkel, 
1813- 
1885. 


248 LECTURE V. 


of John Baptist are studies from the Apostle’s hand, 
but they were written down simply for the purpose 
of recording the doctrine. It was after the writer's 
death that the disciples combined these studies with 
connecting historical matter and oral teaching mto the 
present Gospel. It is therefore inferior to the Synop- 
tists, and especially to Mark, as a source of history.’ 
Dr. Daniel Schenkel,* Professor of Theology at 
Basel and Heidelberg, carried out to further develop- 
ments the main ideas of Weisse. There are two chief 
collections of speeches, the one extending to the end 
of the 12th chapter, the other from the 13th to 
the end of the 17th chapter. These are Johannine. 
The history, and many details in the middle of the 
speech-sections, belong to a later hand. Schenkel 
afterwards so far agreed with the Tiibingen school 
that he regarded the Gospel as altogether an ideal 
composition, but he thought it should be derived 
from Asia Minor about Α.Ὁ. 110-120, and that it is 
thus indirectly connected with the Apostle and Ephe- 
sus.” Later still he gave up all connexion between 
the Gospel and the Apostle, and abandoned the resi- 
dence of John in Asia Minor ;° and in his latest 
work, The Christ of the Apostles,’ he placed the Gospel 


3 Evangelische Geschichte, 1838 ; Christusbild der Apostel, wnd der 
Die Evangelienfrage, 1856. nachapostolischen Zeit, 1879, pp. 
* Theologische Studien und Kri- 188 sqq. 
tiken, 1840, pp. 762, 771; review > Charakterbild, ed. 1, loc. cit. 
of Neander, Weisse, and Strauss. 6 Ibid. ed. 4, loc. cit. 
Charakterbild Jesu, 1864, pp. 29 7 Christusbild, loc. cit. 
sq.; ed. 4, 1873, pp/ 25 sq. ; 


LECTURE V. 249 


in the middle of the second century, and derived it 
from Asia Minor or Alexandria. 
| Dr. Alexander Schweizer,*® Professor of Theology 
at Ziirich, in his Gospel of John, which was pub- 
lished in 1841, a work of high tone and great acute- 
ness, endeavoured to show that the events which 
have Galilee as their scene are in their present form 
by a later hand.? The Johannine ministry of Jesus 
was limited to Judxa, but this portion 15 of true his- 
torical character, and the discourses are authoritative. 
The additions were later than John’s death, but 
before the Gospel was first published.t| This view 
was in part adopted and developed by Kriiger-Velt- 
husen,” but had been meantime abandoned by the 
author.* 

Herr Johann Rudolf Tobler, a Ziirich pastor, who 
some thirty years ago attracted much attention by his 
works on the Fourth Gospel, thought some portions 
of the Gospel came from the Apostle himself in 
Aramaic, but that these amount to less than one- 
tenth of the whole. Special features, and chrono- 
logical and geographical notices, mark an original 
witness, who was the Apostle John ; but these por- 
tions were added to and worked up by Apollos, the 


8 Das Evangelium Johannes i. 21 8q., xvi. 30, xvill. 9, xix. 
nach seinem innern Werthe und 35-37. 


seiner Bedeutung fiir das Leben ' Das Evangelium Johannes, ut 
Jesu kritisch untersucht, Leipzig, swpra, p. 276. 
1841. 2 Leben Jesu, 1872. 

9 John, capp. 11. 1-12, iv. 44- 3 Protestantische Kirchenzeitwng, 


54, vi. 1-26, and also cap. xxi., 1864, pp. 362 sqq. 
and some smaller insertions, capp. 


Schweizer, 
1808- 


Tobler. 


Ewald, 
1803- 
1875. 


250 LECTURE V. 


author also of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who thus 
produced a spiritual Gospel which was opposed to 
Judaism and in favour of Hellenism. The place is 
Ephesus, and the time the first century.’ 

Dr. Heinrich Ewald,’ the very apostle of untram- 
melled thought, received in 1858, after his expulsion 
from Gottingen, a call to Tiibingen, where he was 
professor for ten years; but no man was a more de- 
termined opponent of Baur and the Tiibingen school. 
He held with characteristic freedom and characteristic 
strength his own views of the historic value of the 
discourses and the narratives of the miracles in the 
Fourth Gospel; but this does not weaken the force of 
his position as to the authorship. The Apostle some- 
where about the year a.p. 80 composed his Gospel, 
availing himself of the help of trusted friends, who 
ten years later, but still before the Apostle’s death, 
added the twenty-first chapter. Here ® another hand 
appears more freely than in the Gospel itself, though 
it was not wholly absent even there.’ LEwald’s de- 
finite views as to the authenticity have been made 
familiar to English students by Oxford and Cam- 
bridge teachers, to whom I have already made refer- 


* Die Evangelienfrage vm allge- — senschaft, Gottingen, 1851, pp. 150 
meinen u. die Johannesfrage insbe- sq. ; 1853, pp. 92 sq. ; 1860, pp. 
sondere, 1858 ; Zeitschrift fiir wis- 83 sq.; 1865, pp. 212 sq.; Die 
senschaftliche Theologie, 1860, pp. Johanneischen Schriften, 1861, 1. 
169 sqq.; Evangeliwm Johaumnis pp. 1-59; Geschichte des Volkes 
nach dem Grundtext, 1867 ; Grund- —_ Israel, 1868, vil. pp. 287 sq. 
ziige der evangelischen Geschichte, 6 John, cap. xxi. 24, 25. 

1870. 7 Ibid. cap. xix. 35. 

° Jahrbiicher der biblischen Wis- 


LECTURE V. Wot 


ence. This is a quotation from an article by Ewald 
which Canon Liddon makes with approval :— 


Those who since the first discussion of this question have 
been really conversant with it, never could have had and 
never have had a moment’s doubt. As the attack on St. 
John has become fiercer and fiercer, the truth during the last 
ten or twelve years has been more and more solidly estab- 
lished, error has been pursued into its last hiding-places, and 
at this moment the facts before us are such that no man who 
does not will knowingly to choose error and to reject truth, 
can dare to say that the fourth Gospel is not the work of the 
Apostle John.® 


These are words which Bishop Westcott quotes 
with the comment, ‘ For the rest Ewald’s calm and 
decisive words are, I believe, simply true’ :— 


That John is really the author of the Gospel, and that no other 
planned and completed it than he who at all times is named 
as its author, cannot be doubted or denied, however often in 
our times critics have been pleased to doubt and deny it on 
grounds which are wholly foreign to the subject: on the con- 
trary every argument, from every quarter to which we can 
look, every trace and record, combine together to render any 
serious doubt upon the question absolutely impossible.® 


Professor Karl von Hase,' whose death is one of Hase, 


the many which critical science has mourned over 
during the last few months, had been known to suc- 
cessive generations for more than half a century, not 


8 Géttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, Gospels, ed. 3, p- x. 
Aug. 1863, review of Renan; 1 Geschichte Jesu, 1876, 1.6. an 
Gratry, Jésus-Christ,p.119; Lid- enlargement of the Leben Jesu, 
don, Bampton Lectures, 1866, ed. edd. 1-5, 1829-65; Die Tiibinger 
13, 1889, p. 220. Schule—Sendschreiben an Baur, 
® Westcott, Introduction to the 1855. 


1800- 
1889. 


252, LECTURE V. 


only as a first authority on the history and dogma of 
the Church, but as a defender of the Fourth Gospel 
in the method of Schleiermacher, differing from his 
master chiefly m that he ascribed the Apocalypse 
also to the Apostle.” But in the History of Jesus, 
which was published in 1876, he advances the opinion 
of his old age, that the Gospel is not the immediate 
work of the Apostle. In Asia Minor, and especially 
in Ephesus, there had been formed through the nar- 
rations of John, who was one of the last and most 
revered of the eye-witnesses of the life of Jesus, a 
Gospel-tradition which was quite distinct from the 
Galilean. After the death of John, perhaps a decade 
or more, this Johannine tradition was written down 
by a gifted disciple of the Apostle. The disciple has 
lived in the thoughts of his illustrious master, and 
has written only as the master himself would have 
written. Thus arose a ‘Gospel according to John,’ 
which in the next generation became a ‘Gospel of 
John.’ And yet Hase was, like Strauss,*? doubtful of 
his doubts. He had for many years fought against 
them, and was to the end least of all in agreement with 
those who are confident in setting aside this Gospel. 
He confessed with a sad heart that he could not be 
sure of the full Johannine authorship, though he 
had expressed this in the last edition of his Manual, 
and he feels that opinion may change again.' 

* Cf. Strauss, Leben Jesu fiir 52, cf. pp. 611, 612, Kirchenge- 
das deutsche Volk, pp. 23 sq. schichte, 1885, i. pp. 183 sq. ; and 


5. Cf. Lecture IV. p. 198. Kirchengeschichte. Lehrbuch, 1886, 
* Geschichte Jesu, ut supra, p. pp. 37 sq. 


LECTURE V. 253 

Dr. Reuss, until recently professor at Strasburg, 
who writes now in French and now in German, but 
who since the annexation of Alsace has become a 
German citizen, has been for half a century prominently 
known as an independent member of the liberal party 
of the Lutheran church. His works® which relate to 
the present subject are everywhere marked by great 
ability, and by a striking combination of reverence and 
freedom. In the earlier works he accepts the Johan- 
nine authorship, but thinks that the speeches are to 
be largely traced, not with Baur to metaphysical 
conceptions, but to religious mysticism. In the later 
editions of his well-known History of the Canon in 
1874 and 1887, he admits the ‘ double element,’ and 
in the Johannine Theology ® published in 1879 he no 
longer holds in the full sense the direct Johannine 
authorship. The author, in his opinion, distinguishes 
himself from 8. John in more than one passage, but 
In Dr. 


derives his materials immediately from him. 
Reuss’s own striking words :— 


If we are authorized by the form of the Fourth Gospel to 
see in it more than a simple biography, this first impression 
is amply confirmed by the contents and substance of the book. 
It is in reality a theological treatise, as much asthe Epistle to 


> Ideen zur Hinleitung in das 
EHvangelim Johannes—Denkschrift 
der theologischen Gesellschaft zu 
Strasburg, 1840; Die Geschichte 
der heiligen Schriften, Neues Testa- 
ment, ed. 1, 1842 ; ed. 2, 1853; 
ed. 5, 1874, Eng. Trans. 1884; 
ed. 6, 1887; Histoire de la théo- 


logie chrétienne aw siécle aposto- 
lique, 1852 ; Eng. Trans. 1872; 
Théologie Johannique in La Bible, 
Noweau Testament, vi® partie, 
1879. 

ὁ Théologie Johannique, ut su- 
pra, pp. 40 sq. 


Reuss, 


254 LECTURE V. 


the Hebrews, and more so than any of 8. Paul’s Epistles. It 
is an exposition of the Christian faith inasmuch as the person 
of Christ is its centre. It is diminishing its intention to say 
that it is a pragmatic history of the struggle between the 
Jews and their unrecognized and rejected Saviour; it is, on 
the contrary, a picture of the world’s opposition (in all ages) 
to the Light which comes from God, full of grace and truth. 
This does not imply that this theology has no historic basis. 
On the contrary, the Johannine Gospel is a striking proof 
that all Christian theology is raised on such a basis, and that 
in this it is distinguished from a purely philosophic theology. 
But we affirm that the author had no intention of teaching 
his hearers history ; he knows it, or supposes it to be known, 
and undertakes to interpret it, to reveal its inmost meaning, 
to show that here are other things besides popular teaching, 
or miracles that appeal to the imagination, or tragic com- 
plications, such as are met with throughout the annals of 
humanity.‘ The Fourth Gospel has come to us without the 
author’s name, like most of the other elements of which the 
sacred volume iscomposed. Criticism has shown itself power- 
less, either to raise traditional opinion above all serious and 
legitimate doubt, or to relegate this document to an inferior 
position and assimilate it to the literary productions of a 
_ second generation which had lost to some extent the crea- 
tive genius of their predecessors. We consider that this is 
a providential warning for religious science. Ideas are more 
essential than proper names, and the value of the former is 
independent of the certainty of the latter.’ 


It is significant that the sixth edition of the His- 
tory of the Canon no longer treats of the Fourth 
Gospel immediately after the Synoptics, but deals 
with it after the Epistle of Clement. But the ex- 
ternal evidence for the Johannine authorship may 


7 Théologie Johannique, 1879, p. 12. 8 Ibid. p. 108. 


LECTURE V. 209 


still, he thinks, be possibly convincing: and the 
strongest objection is the yet weightier evidence for 
the Apocalypse, which cannot be by the same writer 
as the Gospel.’ 

M. Renan draws! a sharp distinction between 
the authentic and the unauthentic portions of the 
Gospel, but his principle of division is exactly op- 
posed to that of those who preceded him. It is not 
the historical setting, but the discourses, which are 
now questioned. The history, indeed, is to be pre- 
ferred to that of the Synoptists, but the discourses 
are ‘tirades prétentieuses, lourdes, mal écrites,’ and it 
is not by these that Jesus founded his divine work.? 
In the preface to the thirteenth edition, Renan gives 
a summary of the views which were held as to the 
Fourth Gospel. His own view in the first edition 
18 :— 

The Fourth Gospel is in the main the work of the Apostle 
John, but it has perhaps been edited and retouched by his 
disciples. ‘The facts which are related in this Gospel are 
direct records of Jesus, but the discourses are often free com- 


positions, which express only the author’s conception of the 
mind of Jesus. 


His view in the thirteenth edition and afterwards 
i 
The Fourth Gospel is not the work of the Apostle John. 


It was attributed to him by one of his disciples about the 
year 100. The discourses are almost wholly fictitious; but 


9 Geschichte, ut supra, ed. 6, Ὁ Vie de Jésus, 1863; ed. 17, 
1887, p. 249. 1882. 
aNd | 0) pipe 


Renan, 
1823- 


Sabatier, 
1839- 


256 LECTURE V. 


the narrative portions contain valuable traditions, which go 
back in part to the Apostle John. 


After referring to the opinion which places the 
Gospel well on in the second century, he adds :— 

I cannot go wholly with this radical party. I hold always 
to the belief that the Fourth Gospel has a real connection 


with the Apostle John, and that it was written towards the 
end of the first century.* 


Dr. Sabatier, Professor of Theology in the Protes- 
tant Faculty of the University of Paris, is the author 
of an essay on the Sources of the Life of Jesus,* which 
is largely devoted to the Fourth Gospel and intended 
to support the Johannine authorship. But in a later 
article, in Lichtenberger’s Encyclopedia, Dr. Sabatier 
gives up the immediate authorship, and thinks the 
writer to be one of John’s disciples who has edited the 
Gospel history after the form known in Asia Minor. 
The Apocalypse was the work of the author himself : 
the Gospel is a spiritualized apocalypse written by 
a disciple. Dr. Sabatier remains convinced that the 
roots of the thought of the Fourth Gospel are to be 
found in the Apocalypse and in the Jewish-Christian 
theology generally, not in Paulinism. The develop- 
ment from the teaching of Jesus to the theology of 
John is natural and without a break, and it is this 
which explains its incomparable serenity.” 


3 Ut supra, ed. 18, pp. x, xi; de Jésus, les trois premiers Evan- 
ef. ed. 17, 1882, pp. Iviii sq., giles et le quatriéme, 1866. 
477 sq. > Encyclopédie des Sciences reli- 
4 Essai sur les sowrces de la vie gieuses, 1880, vii. pp. 181-193. 


LECTURE V. 207 


Professor Karl von Weizsiicker, who became 
Baur’s successor in the professorial chair at Tiibingen 
in 1861, published in 1864, after several essays in 
the Year-Book for German Theology of which he was 
editor,® his remarkable Investigations of the Gospel 
History.’ John is, he thinks, the indirect, a trusted 


disciple ‘of the Apostle is the direct, author; or it. 


might have been composed by disciples after the 
Apostle’s oral teaching or notes. The whole Gospel 
has a double character. At every point it is an his- 
torical report of the sayings and deeds of Christ ; but 
it is also an ideal composition, and every detail of the 
representation has a double sense. In his latest 
work on the Apostolic Age, published in 1886, and re- 
published in the present year,® Dr. Weizsiicker takes 
the age of the Apostles, properly so-called, to end at 
the year A.D. 70. The following thirty years are the 
Johannine period. There was a Johannine school in 
Ephesus. The two principal works which bear the 
name of John probably came from the school of the 


Apostle, but neither is the work of John, who re-’ 


mained a Jew and formed ἃ Jewish-Christian church.’ 
At the time the Gospel was written the Apostle was 
dead, but his death had not long taken place." 

Dr. Wendt, the Heidelberg professor, has in part 


6 Jahrbiicher fiir deutsche 1886. Cf.thevaluable criticism by 
Theologie, 1857, pp. 154sqq.;1859, Loofs in Theologische Literaturzei- 
pp. 685 sqq.; 1862, pp. 619 sqq. tung, 1887, No. 3, pp. 51-61 ; ed. 

7 Untersuchungen tiber die evan- 2, 1890. 
gelische Geschichte, 1864, 1. Theil, 9. Ibid. ed. 2, pp. 504 sq. 

11. pp. 220-302. ' Ibid. p. 536. 

8. Das Apostolische Zeitalter, 


Weiz- 
sicker, 
1822- 


Wendt, 
1853- 


The 
negative 
school : 


German 


258 LECTURE ν. 


renewed and has also carried to fresh issues the theories 
of Weisse and Schenkel. He thinks, in his Doctrine 
of Jesus,’ that there is a genuine historical document 
issuing from John which corresponds to the Logoa 
used by Matthew. In the original Logia these dis- 
courses are confined to the last days of Jesus, but are 
by the editor made to extend over the whole ministry. 
Use is also made of sources of Pauline thought, and 
of the Acts of the Apostles. He finds traces of 
Hebrew origin in the part which has the primary 
historical document for a basis, and thinks that the 
writer was an Ephesian disciple of John.’ 

These writers, while they differ much from each 
other, agree in the opinion that the Gospel is in part, 
if not in whole, directly or indirectly, to be traced to 
the Apostle John. 


A number of other writers who are lineal descen- 
dants of the Tiibingen school, and are characterized 
by a similar boldness and a similar freedom, but are 
not strictly bound by either the principles or the 
results of their predecessors, may be conveniently 
grouped together and spoken of as ‘the present ne- 
gative school.’ The school will naturally have three 
chief divisions, the German, the Dutch, the English. 
It will be sufficient to notice the following :— 

Dr. Theodor Keim, to whom reference has already 


2 Die Lehre Jesu, 1886,i. pp. in Theologische Literatwrzeitung, 
215 sq. 1886, No. 9, pp. 197-200. 
3 Cf. review by MHoltzmann 


LECTURE V. 259 
been made in this course of lectures,* and whose too 
early death, in 1878, left a gap which has not yet been 
filled, held that the Gospel has an historical purpose, 
but that the writer is no eye-witness or setter forth of 
objective facts. He is everywhere under the control 
of the subjective idea. Before he comes to the history 
of Jesus, he gives a philosophic view of the universe, 
which is that of Philo. Dr. Keim thinks that when 
a historian begins with philosophy, he will adapt that 
which actually happened to suit his point of view.® 
The writer of the Fourth Gospel, in his opinion, finds 
the Logos before the creation of the world and traces 
it through all preceding history, and describes the life 
of Jesus in accordance with this idea and from this 
exalted standpoint. Unlike Luke, he declines to give 
a full history of Jesus,° and gives such a selection of 
details as will maintain the judgment of faith as to 
the person of Jesus, in opposition to Gnostic unbelief. 
The date is the time of Trajan, a.p. 100-117. Ina 
later recasting of Dr. Keim’s work, which was of a 
more popular character, the date is placed at about 


4 Cf. Lecture I. p. 3. ohne Zweifel unter Kaiser Trajan 


> Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, 
1867-71, i. pp. 103-172 ; Dritte 
Bearbeitung, 2te Aufl.1875, pp. 38 
sq., 377 sq. ; cf. Hausrath, Neu- 
testamentliche Zeitgeschichte, 1873, 
111. pp. 565-625 ; 1877, iv. pp. 376 
sqq. 

® John, cap. xx. 30. 

7 *Die dusseren Zeichen erge- 
ben: das 4. Evangelium ist in den 
Anfiingen des 2. Jahrhunderts 


zwischen 100-117 nach Chr. ent- 
standen, immerhin so spit nach 
den Synoptikern und nach dem 
Firsten der Synoptiker, dass es 
alle Miithe hatte, neben ihrer in 
den Gemeinden immer schon be- 
festigten Auctoritiit sich seine 
Bahn zu brechen.’? Keim, Ge- 
schichte Jesu von Nazara, 1867, 
Bd. 1. p. 146. 


m 
bo 


Keim, 
1825— 
1878. 


H. Holtz- 
mann, 
1832- 


260 LECTURE V. 


A.D. 130.5 The author is a Christian of Jewish origin, 
belonging to the Dispersion of Asia Minor. 

Dr. Heinrich Holtzmann, now professor in Stras- 
burg, a prolific author, whose recent Jntroduction to 
the New Testament has placed him in the first rank 
of writers on this subject, holds that the Gospel is 
an ideal composition based upon Synoptic material, 
of about the same period as the Epistle to the 
Hebrews and the Epistle of Barnabas, and that it was 
generally admitted into the Church after about a.p. 
150. The Logos Gospel is not so much a history of 
the life of Jesus as a picture of His inmost being. 
It is no more pure fiction than the assertion in 
5. Matthew :— 


All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no 
man knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither knoweth any 
man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the 
Son will reveal him ; ° 
and the solution of the problem is to be found in the 
balance of the ideal and historical elements. He 
holds that the Gospel was in the hands of Justin, 
A.D. 150, but that in Barnabas and Clement, Α.Ὁ. 
93-125, we are only in a Johannine nebula. The 
star of the Gospel had not yet risen. 


“Das Evangelium ist also  sqq.; Lehrbuch der Hinleitung in 
wahrscheinlich erst um’sJahr130 das Newe Testament, ed. 2, 1886, 


geschrieben worden;.. .’? Ed. pp. 438-488; Die Gnosis und das 
1875, ut supra, p. 40. Johanneische Evangeliwm, 1877 : 
9 Matt. xi. 27. cf. Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaftliche 


1 In Schenkel’s Bibel-Lexikon,  Theologie, 1869, pp. 62 sqq., 155 
1869-1871, art. Hvangelium nach sqq., 446 sqq.; 1871, pp. 336 
Johannes, ii. pp. 221 sqq., and art. sqq.; 1875, pp. 40 sqq.; 1877, pp. 
Johannes der Apostel, 111. pp. 328 187 sqq. 


LECTURE V. - 261 


Dr. Wilhelm Honig is known to us from a series 
of remarkable articles on the construction of the 
Fourth Gospel which were published in filgenfeld’s 
Review.2 He presents a scheme with two main 
divisions, the one consisting of the first eleven chap- 
ters, and the other of the remainder of the Gospel, 
each division having an introduction and three parts.° 
The whole work is arranged in accordance with a 
preconceived plan of threes, and therefore is not 
historical.* 

Dr. Albrecht Thoma has already occupied our 
attention by his special investigations into Justin’s 
use of the Fourth Gospel.’ He is also the author 
of a work of high order on the origin of the Gospel, 
in which he regards the Evangelist as a Christian 
Philo, a child of the Alexandrine Judaism which 
proceeded from the chief school in Ephesus. He 
thinks that he is identical with the presbyter of the 
Second and Third Epistles of John, and somewhat 
later than the insurrection of Bar-Kochba, a.p. 132 or 
133; and that he attempted to form a mosaic of the 
Logos-Christus revelation on the basis of the religious 
philosophy of Alexandria. He finds materials for his 
allegorical work in the Synoptic Gospels, the Old 
Testament, the writings of Philo, the substance of 
the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline development of 


> Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaftliche pp. 85 sqq. : οἵ. Holtzmann, H. 
Theologie, 1871. J., ibid. 1881, pp. 257 sqq. ; and 

3 John, cap. i.-xi. and xii.-xxi. LHinleitung, wt supra, p. 401. 

4 Zeitschrift, ut supra, pp. 585 > Cf. Lecture II. pp. 73 sq. 
sqq.; 1883, pp. 216 sqq. ; 1884, 


Honig. 


Thoma, 
1844— 


Mangold, 
1825- 
1890. 


Oscar 
Holtz- 
mann. 


262 LECTURE V. 


It follows that the work 
The Fourth Gospel is 
only the setting of the Logos doctrine in a life of 
Jesus.° 


doctrine, the Apocalypse. 
can have no historical value. 


Dr. Wilhelm Mangold, professor at Bonn, and 
editor of the later editions of Bleek’s Introduction,’ 
appends to the more conservative pages of his author, 
a series of footnotes characterized by remarkable 
ability and fairness, but in the spirit of, and sometimes 
with the results of, the more negative criticism. His 
view of the Fourth Gospel is that the external evi- 
dence is scarcely less strong than that of the Synoptic 
Gospels, and would be sufficient to certify it, if the 
internal grounds for accepting the authenticity did 
not oppose, as it at least up to the present appears, 
insuperable difficulties.® 

Herr Oscar Holtzmann is a younger brother of 
the Strasburg professor, to whom we have just 
referred, but his work on the Gospel of John” is the 
result of independent and careful research ; and, 
while less pretentious than many, it is perhaps not 
less valuable than any work of this school. The 
Fourth Gospel is for him a Christian book of devo- 
tion, rather than an artistic presentation of a philo- 
sophy of religion, and he here avowedly sides with 


® Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaft- ment, ed. 4, 1886. Cf. Lecture 


liche Theologie, 1877, pp. 289 sqq. ; 
1879, pp. 18 sqq., 171 sqq., 273 
sqq. ; Die Genesis des Johannes- 
Hvangeliums, 1882. 

τ Hinleitung in das Neue Testa- 


VI. p. 314. 

8 Einleitung, ut supra, p. 388, 
note. 

® Das Johannesevangelium un- 
tersucht wnd erklirt, 1887. 


LECTURE V. 263 


Luthardt, and not with Thoma.!. The Gospel is, he 
thinks, grafted on the post-Pauline literature which 
was influenced by Alexandrine Judaism. The teach- 
ing of Paul and that of Philo are elements in its com- 
position. The author is a Jewish Christian living 
between A.p. 70 and 135, and his dependence upon 
the Luke Gospel makes it probable that he did not 
write before A.D. 100.2 It is hardly possible to assign 
a more exact date than the first quarter of the second 
century.° 

It is especially worthy of notice that Holtzmann 
follows Thoma and Keim in holding that the author 


was a Jew by birth,’ and still more important that so | 


weighty an authority as Schiirer, writing in July 
1887,° thinks this opinion to be in the highest degree 
probable. 


The modern Dutch school, which has of late years 
taken a prominent place in advanced criticism and 
subjective theories, and is duly heralded by a special 
Theological Journal,’ may for the present purpose be 
represented by Scholten, the late Emeritus Professor 
of Leyden, though, as Dr. Salmon remarks, 
it became as hard for a young professor, anxious to gain 


a reputation for ingenuity, to make a new assault on a New 
Testament book, as it is now for an Alpine club man to find 


1 Das Johannesevangeluum, 5 Cf. Schiirer’s review in Theo- 
W.8.W., Ὁ. 4. logische Literaturzeitung, 1887, No. 

* Ibid. p. 79. 14, p. 331. 

3 Ibid. p. 173. ὁ Theologisch Tijdschrift. 


4 Ibid. p. 74. 


Dutch: 


Scholten, 
1811- 
1885. 


264 LECTURE V. 


in Switzerland a virgin peak to climb. The consequence has 
been that in Holland, Scholten and others, who had been 
counted as leaders in the school of destructive criticism, have 
been obliged to come out in the character of conservatives, 
striving to prove, in opposition to Loman, that there really 
did live such a person as Jesus of Nazareth, and that it is 
not true that every one of the epistles ascribed to Paul is a 


forgery.” 


Scholten’s chief treatise is The Gospel according to 
John,® published in 1864, in which he asks :-— 


Is the fourth Evangelist John the son of Zebedee?... . 
the writer of the Apocalypse? .... a Palestinian Jew? 
. adew?? 


And to each question he gives a negative answer. 
His view of the Fourth Gospel is that it is an 
ideal conception of the evangelical history. It is 
the highest form of the revelation of Christianity, 
and has attained this height by assuming the ele- 
ments of truth which it found in Gnosticism, and 
in the doctrines of Marcion and Montanus. It thus 


7 Introduction, ed. 2, p. 379. 
Cf. Holtzmann, H. J., Hinleitung, 
ed. 2, pp. 192-3. 

8 Historisch-kritische Inleidung 
in de Schriften des Niewwe Testa- 
ments, 1853, ed. 2, and in Ger- 
man, 1856; Schrifter van den 
Apostel Johannes ὧν Bijbelsch 
woordenboek, Amsterdam, 1855— 
he here takes the Gospel to be 
Johannine ; Het Evangelie naar 
Johannes, 1864-66—German by 
Lang, 1867—French by Réville, 
in Revue de Théologie, Strasburg, 


1864-66 ; De oudste getwigenissen, 
and in German, Die diltesten 
Zeugnisse, by Manchot, 1867 ; 
Het Apostel Johannes in Klein- 
Asié, 1871—and in German, 
by Spiegel, 1872. 

° Ts de vierde evangelist Jo- 
hannes, de zoon van Zebedeiis ? 
.... deschrijver der Apocalypse? 

. een palestijnsche Jood? 

. eenJood ?’—Het Evangelie 
naar Johannes, ut supra, part v. 
pp. 399-440. 


LECTURE V. 265 


freed Christianity from the authority of the Old 
Testament, and from Jewish-Christian and Petrine 
elements. Such passages as— 


Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which 
all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come 
forth ; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of 
life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of 
damnation. 

And this is the will of him that sent me, that everyone 
which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have ever- 
lasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day. 

No man can come to me, except the Father which hath 
sent me draw him: and 1 will raise him up at the last day. 

He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath 
one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same 
shall judge him in the last day.! 


are insertions, perhaps by the hand which wrote the 
twenty-first chapter. The Logos become flesh is 
king in a realm of truth, and the Paraclete is the 
principle of truth. Baur, in his opinion, is wrong 
in thinking that the author wished to support the 
Eastern view of the Paschal question; he established 
the Pauline spiritualism which would abolish all 
feasts. The author is a philosophically trained 
Gentile-Christian, and the date is about 150. In 
Scholten’s later work, The Oldest Witnesses,” he can 
find no trace of the Gospel before 170, and in discus- 
sing the residence in Asia Minor he came to the 


1 John v. 28, 29; vi. 40, 44; 2 Die iiltesten Zeugnisse, p. 
xii. 48. 180. 


English : 


Tayler, 
St 
1869. 


266 LECTURE V. 


conclusion that John was never in Asia Minor and 
was not the author of the Apocalypse.* 


The modern negative school has had few advo- 
cates of any prominence among English writers upon 
the Fourth Gospel—they have for the most part con- 
tented themselves by speaking of the work as already 
accomplished on the Continent ; but the following 
demand notice at our hands :— 

Mr. J. J. Tayler, formerly Principal of Manchester 
New College, in an able and thoroughly candid but, 
as it seems to me, an unconsciously partial criticism, 
assigns the Gospel to the first half of the second cen- 
tury. The writer’s investigations are made at first 
hand, but he is largely guided by Hilgenfeld, especi- 
ally on the Paschal question,* to which he devotes 
no small part of his inquiry. It cannot but be re- 
gretted that it has been impossible to have the judg 
ment of so real a scholar and thinker, since the new 
lights which have been shed upon the criticism of 
the Fourth Gospel during the last twenty years. 
The opinion which Mr. Tayler formed was that 
the Gospel is not the work of the Apostle, and was 
probably written by John the Presbyter. He has 
little doubt that the author of the Gospel and the 
First Epistle were one and the same person. The 


° Cf. Hilgenfeld in opposition Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1872, pp. 
to this: Zeitschrift fiir wissen- 325-330, and in Appendix to 
schaftliche Theologie, 1872, pp. German edition of the Zeugnisse. 
349-383, and Scholten’s reply in * Cf. Lecture VIII. p. 424. 


LECTURE V. 267 


Gospel and the Apocalypse cannot be by the same 
author.” Mr. Tayler 


found how impossible it was, in every case but that of Paul, 
to establish satisfactory evidence of direct personal author- 
ship: and came at length to the full persuasion, that the one 
point of importance to ascertain respecting any particular 
book, was simply this;—that, whoever might have written 
it, it belonged to the first age, while the primitive inspiration 
was still clear and strong,—and that it could be regarded as a 
genuine expression of the faith and feeling which then pre- 
vailed.® 


The work entitled Supernatural Religion” was 
published anonymously, and the name of the author 
The book 


created for the moment a great sensation, and six 


has never been authoritatively declared. 


editions were issued in a little more than twelve 


months.’ This treatise is not primarily a critical 


discussion on the Fourth Gospel. It is, like the work 
of Strauss, occupied with other matters, and a writer 
who undertakes an inquiry about the Fourth Gospel, 
after he has placed before his readers a lengthy 


5 An Attempt to ascertain the 
Character of the Fourth Gospel, 
especially in its Relation to the 
Three First, London, 1867; ed. 
2, by J.[ames]| M.[artineau], 1870 ; 
The Theological Review, vol. v. 
pp. 373-401, July 1868, review 
of Davidson’s Introduction: cf. 
infra, pp. 272 and 285. 

ὁ Preface, ut supra, 1867, p. vil. 


8 Preface, recently republished, 
in a reply to Dr. Lightfoot’s 
essays, to ed. 6, March 15, 1873. 
This preface contains a reply to 
criticisms on the work. The 
contents of the original edition 
are arranged as follows :—Part I. 
Miracles, vol. i. pp. 1-216 ; 
Part Il. The Synoptic Gospels, 
vol. i. pp. 217-490; vol. 1]. pp. 


i Wid: .1,42 vols, 1874s eds. 7. 
‘complete edition, carefully re- 
vised,’ 1879. 


1-250; Part III. The Fourth 
Gospel, vol. ii. pp. 251-492. 


Super- 
natural 
Religion. 


Opinions 
of this 
work by 


268 LECTURE V. 


negative criticism on miracles and the supernatural, 
can hardly be said to approach the historical investi- 
gation with an open mind. The expectation will 
be raised—and it is not disappointed—that the 
author has adopted the extremer opinions of some 
continental writers, and that he thinks the Johannine 
authorship of the Fourth Gospel to be on all grounds 
wholly unworthy of credit. For the sake of compari- 
son with some writers of the same school, the follow- 
ing statements may be noted :— 


The external evidence that the Apostle John wrote the 
Apocalypse is more ancient than that for the authorship of 
any book of the New Testament, excepting some of the 
Epistles of Paul.° | 

Whilst a strong family likeness exists between the 
Epistles and the Gospel, and they exhibit close analogies 
both in thought and language, the Apocalypse, on the con- 
trary, is so different from them in language, in style, in 
religious views and terminology, that it is impossible to 
believe that the writer of the one could be the author of the 
other.! 


The publication of this work naturally attracted 
the attention of scholars ; and the criticism of Bishops 
Lightfoot and Westcott, of Drs. Sanday and Ezra 
Abbot produced permanent additions to theological 
literature.” Further criticism is not now needed, but 
the general character of the book may be briefly 
indicated by two or three examples. The following 

° Supernatural Religion, ed. 1, * Cf. Lecture VI. pp. 336 and 


part iii. vol. ii. p. 392. 343 sqq. 
' Ibid. p. 388. 


LECTURE V. 269 


notes will serve to show Dr. Zahn’s view as to the 
author’s treatment of the Tenatian question :— 


What I have already said against the author of the book 
Supernatural Religion, who mixes up different recensions and 
reiterates the most trifling arguments of others, must suffice. 

Volkmar had a follower in the writer of the book Super- 
natural Religion, more audacious even than himself. 


Similarly as to Polycarp :— 


The author of the book Supernatural Religion also, doubt- 
ing whether he should say that the whole was supposititious 
or that it was interpolated, repeated the arguments of Dallaeus 
which had been refuted a thousand times. Lightfoot an- 
swered him splendidly, and in every way argued with great 
ability on the integrity and authenticity of the Epistle.° 


Ten years after its publication, when the con- 
troversy had ceased and the book was well-nigh for- 
gotten, this was Dr. Salmon’s judgment upon it :— 


The extreme captiousness of its criticism found no approval 
from respectable foreign reviewers, however little they might 
be entitled to be classed as believers in Revelation. Dates 
were assigned in it to some of our New Testament books so 
late as to shock anyone who makes an attempt fairly to judge 


3 ¢ Contra auctorem libri Super- 
natural Religion 1. 264 sq., recen- 
siones diversas confundentem et 
aliorum levissima argumenta ite- 
rantem sufficiunt, quae dixi Ign. 
117 sq.’ Patr. Ap. Opp. fase. ii. 
1876, p. vi. 

* “Sectatorem 
[Volkmaro] audaciorem habuit 
scriptorem libri Supernatwral 
Religion, i. 268,’—Ibid. p. xii. 


ipso auctore 


5. *Ktiam auctor libri Super- 
natural Religion, i. 274-278, ed. 
2, haesitans, utrum totam supposi- 
ticlam, an interpolatam diceret, 
argumenta Dallaei sexcenties re- 
futata repetivit. LEgregie illi re- 
spondit et omnino de integritate 
atque authentia epistulae optime 
disputavit Lightfootius (Contemp. 
Review, 1875, May, p. 838-852). 
Ibid. p. xlv. 


Zahn, 


Salmon. 


Abbott, 
1838- 


270 LECTURE V. 


of evidence. And the reason is, that the author starts with 
the denial of the supernatural as his fixed principle. . . . This 
book . .. . obtained a good deal of notoriety by dint of 
enormous puffing, great pains having been taken to produce 
a belief that Bishop Thirlwall was the author. The aspect of 
the pages, bristling with learned references, strengthened the 
impression that the author must be a scholar of immense 
reading. The windbag collapsed when Lightfoot showed 
that this supposed Bishop Thirlwall did not possess even a 
schoolboy acquaintance with Greek and Latin, and that his 
references were in some cases borrowed wholesale, in others 
did not prove the things for which they were cited, and very 
often appealed to writers whose opinion is of no value. But 
what I wish here to remark is, that what really made the 
book worthless was not its want of scholarship, but its want 
of candour. . . . want of candour vitiates a book through 
and through. There is no profit in examining the conclu- 
sions arrived at by a writer who never seems to care on which 
side lies the balance of historic probability, but only which 
conclusion will be most disagreeable to the assertors of the 
supernatural. For myself, I find instruction in studying the 
results arrived at by an inquirer who strives to be candid, 
whether he be orthodox or not; but I have little curiosity to 
find out the exact amount of evidence which would leave a 
captious objector without a word to say in justification of his 
refusal to admit it.® 


Dr. Edwin A. Abbott, late Master of the City 
of London School, must be classed among those who 
do not admit S$. John’s authorship or Justin’s use 
of the Fourth Gospel, but his able and interesting 
articles are, as might have been expected from a 
scholar of the writer’s position, widely different in 
tone from the preceding English work. His general 


6 Historical Introduction to the New Testament, ed. 2, pp. 9, 10. 


LECTURE V. 201 


conclusion as to the external evidence, based upon a 
somewhat cursory examination, is 


that, although some of the doctrine of the Fourth Gospel, 
expressed in words similar to the words of the Fourth Gospel, 
was probably current in the Ephesian church towards the 
end of the first half of the second century, yet it was not by 
that time widely used, if at all, as an authoritative document; 
nor have we proof that it was so used till the times of Irenzeus, 
z.e., towards the end of the second century, by which time the 
Gospel was authoritatively quoted as a work of John; and 
those who so quoted it probably meant by ‘ John,’ John the 
son of Zebedee, the apostle.” 


After a fuller examination of the internal evidence 
the writer comes to this conclusion :— 


It is more easy to arrive at negative than at positive re- 
sults, when evidence is so slight ; but it seems probable that 
the author, attempting to give the spiritual essence of the 
gospel of Christ, as a gospel of love, and assigning the 
Ephesian Gospel to the beloved disciple who had presided 
over the Ephesian church, by way of honour and respect 
(for the same reasons which induced the author of the 2nd 
Epistle of Peter to assign that Epistle to the leading apostle), 
and being at the same time conscious that the book (though 
representing the Kphesian doctrine generally, and in part the 
traditions of John the apostle, as well as those of Andrew, 
Philip, Aristion, and John the elder) did not represent the 
exact words and teaching of the disciple—added the words 
‘We know, &c.,’ partly as a kind of imprimatur of Andrew, 
Philip, and the rest; partly in order to imply that other 
traditions besides those of John are set forth in the book ; 
partly to characterize the book as a Gospel of broader basis and 


7 Article Gospels, in Encyclo- Fourth Gospel, in Modern Review, 
pedia Britamvica, ed. 9, 1879, 1882, pp. 559-588 ; 716-756. CE. 
vol, x. p. 824; Justin’s Use of the Lecture II. p. 80. 


Davidson, 
1807- 


His Jntro- 
duction. 


Dedica- 
tion. 


212 LECTURE V. 


greater authority than the less spiritual traditions issuing 
from non-apostolic authors, which our evangelist desired to 
correct or supplement.® 


Dr. Abbott thinks that ‘there is unusually strong 
evidence to show that John the apostle wrote the 
Apocalypse ;’ and regards the First Epistle, with 
Dr. Lightfoot, ‘as a kind of postscript to the 
Gospel.’ ὃ 

But the most important representative of the 
negative school among English writers is Dr. Samuel 
Davidson, who has occupied for nearly half a cen- 
tury a prominent place among biblical critics. This 
writer's direct influence on the study of English 
biblical criticism must have been considerable, and 
his indirect influence has been probably still greater. 
It is therefore necessary to our present subject—the 
negative criticism of our age—to devote to it more 
space than could be afforded to writers whose emi- 
nence might seem to have stronger claims. For 
this reason the statement of his position has been 
reserved for the close of the present lecture. 

His earlier work, an Jntroduction to the New Testa- 
ment,’ published just forty years ago, specially appeals 
to the suffrages of scholars. Its opening page bears 
the well-known words of Milton :— 


It is to the Learned that I address myself, or if it be 
thought that the Learned are not the best Umpires and Judges 


8 Article Gospels, ut supra, p. ' An Introduction to the New 
841. Testament, 3 vols. 1848-51. 
® Ibid. pp. 818, 819. 


LECTURE V. ΟἿΣ 


of such things, I should at least wish to submit my Opinion 
to Men of amature and manly Understanding, possessing a 
thorough Knowledge of the Doctrines of the Gospel ; on whose 
Judgments I should rely with far more Confidence, than on 
those of Novices in these Matters. 


And the closing paragraph of the preface contains 
the same thought :— 


If it obtain the approbation of competent judges, his time 
will not have been spent in vain.? 


The author is himself a competent judge of the 
newer criticism, and refers to it in the following 
cris <—— 


It is the Writer’s belief that the books of the New Testa- 
ment are destined ere long to pass through a severe ordeal. The 
translations of various Continental works which have recently 
appeared in England, and the tendency of certain speculations 
in philosophy, indicate a refined scepticism or a pantheistic 
spirit which confounds the objective and the subjective, or unduly 
subordinates the former to the latter. Many are disposed to 
exalt their intuitions too highly, to the detriment of the his- 
torical, as Kant did his ‘ Pure Reason.’ 

These observations will serve to show why the Author has 
gone with considerable fulness into objections that have been 
urged in modern times against the New Testament books, and 
especially against the Gospels. He thinks it highly probable 
that such objections will appear in one shape or other in this 
country. Hence he has partially anticipated their currency. 
. . . Hence the Author has noticed the researches of the Tii- 
bingen school of theologians, not from a desire to make known 
extravagant and startling assertions to an English Public, but 
because his work would not otherwise have been complete ; 
and because he thinks it not improbable that similar doubts 


2 An Introduction, etc., p. x. 


The newer 
criticism, 


The 
author’s 
position. 


274 LECTURE V. 


may be introduced into England, and may meet with accept- 
ance from certain minds which are predisposed to welcome 
the new and the destructive however intrinsically false.’ 


In another place the author tells us that 


He has intentionally overlooked no source of information with 
which he is acquainted, English or foreign ; and if he has not 
everywhere chosen to specify each one, it should be recollected 
that he had to exercise his own judgment in mentioning 
the most important, and such as are least known to general 
readers.‘ 


Once again he reminds us that 


He has prosecuted his studies in the New Testament by 
day and by night, for several years, in the belief that though 
the work to which he had committed himself was indeed most 
difficult, it behoved him, while life and health remained, to do 
something for the illustration and defence of God’s holy word, 
at a time when scepticism of a peculiar order prevails in the 
land. He can truly say, that he has tried to be impartial in 
his inquiries, divesting himself of preconceived notions as far 
as they might impede research. . . . He must say, however, 
that he has no sympathy with the avowed advocates of systems, 
creeds, and parties. . . . He appeals to the honest lovers of 
truth—to the patient inquirers after God’s will in the New 
Testament—to the anxious and humble student of books 
claiming to be sacred because of heavenly origin.” 


The author who set this task before himself, and 
entered upon it in this spirit of freedom and devotion 
to truth, had special qualifications for his work. He 
was in the prime of his manhood.’ He had been for 

5 Introduction, ut swpra, vol. 1. > Ibid. vol. iii. 1851, pp. xi, xii. 


1848, pp. vi, vii. δ. Forty-one to forty-four : born 
4 Ibid. vol. ii., 1849, pp. v, vi. 1807. 


LECTURE V. 279 


six years, 1835-1841, Professor of Biblical Criticism 
at Belfast to the General Synod of Ulster ; and for a 
like period, from 1842, Professor of Biblical Litera- 
ture and Ecclesiastical History in the Lancashire 
Independent College at Manchester. The University 
of Aberdeen had conferred upon him the degree of 
LL.D. in 1838, and he had already published a series 
of important works on this and cognate subjects.’ 

In writing the /ntroduction, the author was, as he 
himself informs us, 
encouraged by the favourable opinions of scholars in this land, 


in Germany, and in America, whose names stand in the fore- 
most rank of learning,® 


and, excepting a somewhat excessive strength of 
statement from which the writer is seldom free, the 
favourable opinion was fully earned. The book had 
no equal in the English language at the time ; it has 
in some respects no equal now. 

The portion of the work which is devoted to the 
Fourth Gospel contains 147 closely printed large 8vo 
pages, which deal with all the chief problems con- 
nected with the authorship. The following extracts 
will sufficiently show the result of the writer’s careful 
inquiry :— 

It is difficult to say what evidence would be satisfactory to 


some. Much depends on the disposition with which they 


7 Lectures on Biblical Critic-  Lcclesiastical Polity of the New 
ism, 1839 ; Sacred Hermeneutics, Testament, 1848, Schaff-Herzog, 
1843 ; Gieseler’s Compendium of Encyclopedia ; Supplement, p. 49. 
Ecclesiastical History, translated 8 Ut supra, vol. iii. p. xi. 
from the German, 1846-47 ; 


πο 


His view 
of the 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Conclu- 
sion as to 


276 LECTURE V. 


commence their researches, for they may have a strong feeling 
against the acceptance of all testimony, except what the 
circumstances of the case do not warrant. It is natural to 
seek for express and direct testimonies; but they cannot 
always be found. In the field of criticism, approximations to 
historic truth will necessarily constitute the results beyond 
which an inquirer cannot go. He must combine the materials 
before him, weigh minute circumstances, and draw conclusions 
in many cases where irresistible evidence is wanting. He must 
be often contented with probability instead of certainty. It is 
idle to demand tangible proof on every occasion.® 


Again— 


When those who date the origin of our Gospel in the second 
century venture to specify the precise time or nearly so at 
which it appeared, it is easy to demonstrate the impossibility 
of its immediate and general reception as a sacred book by the 
catholic church. On their hypothesis it started, as if by a 
miracle, into common use and authority. There was none to 
detect or expose the fraud. Men who had been John’s dis- 
ciples, or who had conversed with him or his disciples, did 
not venture to raise their voice against the supposititious 
work. All were deceived, or disgracefully silent respecting 
the imposture. They discarded other apocryphal productions ; 
they would not admit other spurious Gospels, while they un- 
hesitatingly adopted this. Whoever can believe the truth of 
such a representation is far more credulous than the early 
Christians, whose easy faith forms an object of his contempt.! 


A oaln— 


In bringing our remarks on the authenticity of the fourth 
Gospel to a close, we cannot refrain from expressing our deep 
and growing conviction of the historical fidelity by which the 
sacred document is pervaded. ‘That it bears the impress of 


® Introduction, ut supra, vol. i. 1 Ibid. vol. i. pp. 270, 271. 
p. 254. 


LECTURE V. 21 


the beloved disciple, fresh and vivid from his tender spirit, 
appears to us unquestionable. And that it purports to be from 
his pen is not less apparent. There are, it is true, difficulties 
connected with it which may never be satisfactorily resolved, 
amid our ignorance of the circumstances in which it appeared ; 
but such difficulties belong in part to every ancient book, and 
are immeasurably increased in the present case, on the suppo- 
sition of our Gospel having originated in the second century on 
Hellenistic ground. The man who could exhibit such a por- 
trait of Christ from his own reflection and fancy at that later 
period, must have been a prodigy to which the century pre- 
sents nothing approaching to a parallel; for it need not be 
told how barren that century was in individuals of creative 
intellect and large heart, like the author of the document in 
question. And then it must be maintained, not only that 
he produced a work equally removed from the anthropomor- 
phic, material religiousness, as from the narrow intellectuality 
of his day, but that he remained in miraculous concealment. 
The spirit, elevated so far above his countrymen and contem- 
poraries, giving utterance to such aspects of Christ’s character 
as have attracted universal humanity in all future time, con- 
tinued unknown. Lxerting, as he did, immeasurable influence 
on the consciousness of the Christian church, he was always 
buried in impenetrable obscurity. And yet he was able to 
procure universal acceptance for his work as though it really 
belonged to an apostolic time, and to an eye-witness of the 
sufferings of Christ. He completely succeeded in his impos- 
ture. The few great ideas which he clothed with flesh and 
blood, commended themselves with astonishing readiness to 
the mind and heart of the Christian world, undetected in their 
source, age, and aim. ‘Those who can believe all this, with 
Baur and his school, have renounced all claim to genuine 
historical criticism, by abandoning themselves to a reckless 
caprice, where calmness of investigation and unbiassed love 
of truth are entirely wanting.? 


2 Introduction, ut supra, vol. 1. pp. 311, 312. 


its 
authen- 
ticity. 


Second 
Introduc- 
tion. 


Change ot 
view 


278 LECTURE V. 


Less than twenty years later Dr. Davidson 
published his second Introduction.? He regarded it 
not as a new edition of the earlier work, but as an 
essentially new work. He was 


determined to conduct his investigations as though he had 
never written on the subject. 


He claims, and no one will question the claim, that 


twenty years’ study may well modify, correct, or enlarge 
views to which an honest though less perfect investigation 
had formerly led.‘ 


His views are, again, 


not put forward lightly, but after anxious thought.’ 


When and under what influences the process of 
modifying, correcting, and enlarging commenced is 
not told. In 1848 the conviction of the historical 
fidelity of the Fourth Gospel is so strong that an 
expression of it cannot be refrained, and it is still 
‘erowing.’® In the preface to the concluding volume 
of the work,’ the same general tone is maintained.® 
In 1868 the growing tree of 1851 has been plucked 

3 An Introduction to the Study geblieben, wie in der Auflage von 
of the New Testament, 2 vols., 1868...’ Schiirer, Theologische 


1868. In the second edition of Literatwrzeitwng, 1882, No. 17, 
this work, published in 1882, the ρ. 394. 


matter is rearranged and in part * Ut supra, 1868, vol. i. pp. vii, 
rewritten so as to incorporate the viii. 

more recent negative criticisms. 5. Ibid. p. ix. 

The standpoint is the same, and 6. Ut supra, vol. 1. 1848, p. 311. 
there are no material additions. 7 May 15, 1851. 


‘Der Standpunkt des Verfassers ὃ Ut supra, vol, iii. 1851, pp. xi, 
im Allgemeinen ist aber derselbe xii. 


LECTURE V. 279 


out by the roots, and hardly any mark of its exist- 
ence left behind, for another tree of sturdy growth 
has taken its place. The later views have long been 
in process of formation ; but the earlier views seem 
also to have satisfied the author’s convictions, for he 
himself frankly tells us :-— 

Though often requested by correspondents to write another 


book, he could not think of doing so while his earlier one 
remained unexhausted.? 


The new views of the Fourth Gospel cannot be 
better described than in the words which the author 
himself applies to the difference between the John of 
the New Testament and the writer of the Gospel :— 


The development . . . is too great for belief. It is not a 
development, so much as an entire change of views—an 
interior metamorphosis which could not have been followed 
by a serenity perfectly free from traces of the process it 
succeeded. We can hardly suppose that the mental conflicts 
of the writer had entirely passed away.! 


It is not merely that the writer now holds the date 
to be ‘about a.p. 150,’ and naively confesses, 


Keim’s date, a.D. 110-117 under Trajan, makes it exceedingly 
difficult to disprove Johannine authorship.? 


It is not that he has modified many of his views and 
arrived at different results ; but at almost every chief 
point in the discussion the later opinions are the 

9. Introduction, ut supra, 1868, 2 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 426. Keim 


vol. i. p. vil. afterwards put the date at about 
1 Tbid. vol. ii. p. 442. 130: supra, p. 260. 


on the 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Similar 
treatment 
of the 
Acts. 


280 LECTURE YV. 


exact opposite of the earlier ones. It is as though a 
corrector for the press had written ‘for 18 read 7s not, 
for is not read is passim.’ Nor is the reader allowed 
to see anywhere the process by which the change is 
arrived at. The discussion of ‘The Gospel of John’ 
occupies 146 pages of the new work. Much of it is 
entirely new, much of the old matter is entirely 
omitted, and the reader is allowed to wade through 
these pages without a hint that the author had more 
fully still established all through the opposite con- 
clusions, and without an attempt to show that the 
earlier statements are erroneous or the earlier argu- 
ments inconclusive. 

Nor is this inconsistency of criticism confined to 
Ὁ. John. To examine it at any length would be 
beyond the limits of the present inquiry, but the 
discussion of one other book—the Acts of the 
Apostles, which comes next in order, and the treat- 
ment of which is intimately bound up with our 
present subject—will provide another illustration of 
the writer’s method. In 1868 this is his opinion :— 


These observations lead to the conclusion that the object 
of the writer was conciliatory. He had two parties in view, 
Jewish- and Gentile-christian, which he wished to bring 
nearer to one another. In the interest of that object he 
moulds the history. A Gentile-christian himself, and regard- 
ing Paul as the great apostle, he shows how near he comes 
to Peter and the other apostles in conduct and sentiments, 
while fully equal to them in official qualifications. . . . To 
further Pauline Christianity by bringing the two ecclesiastical 
parties more closely together, was the author’s leading aim. 


LECTURE V. 281 


This opinion is confirmed by the third gospel, in which the 
writer was actuated by a like purpose. . . . From the con- 
tents of the first chapter compared with the end of the 
gospel, an interval of several years must be put between the 
two books, bringing the date of the Acts to about a.p. 125.3 


So far our author. Now here are Hegel’s trinity 
and Baur’s tendency pure and simple. Previous 
quotations show that the writer had, in 1848-51, 
already examined and rejected these theories as a 
whole. The following words will show his view of 
them as applied to the Acts :— 


In taking leave of this topic, we hesitate not to assert that 
the idea of the book being fabricated by a later unknown 
writer, with whatever motive he set about the task, involves 
the improbable, not to say the impossible, at every step. ‘The 
fabricator must have had the Pauline epistles before him, 
and studied them with the most minute attention. After 
becoming intimately familiar with their contents, even to the 
smallest and apparently the most unimportant particulars, he 
sat down to write in such a way as to incorporate many 
notices derived from them with his materials. Here he 
needed consummate skill, lest the deception should be detected. 
The art demanded for the work was of the most refined and 
exquisite nature. Where did such a man appear in the early 
times of Christianity? It is impossible to point to a pheno- 
menon so marvellous as this. ‘The wakefulness and talents of 
the person who palmed the history on his own generation as 
the authentic production of Paul’s companion, must have been 
extraordinary. Not so constructed are the forgeries of that 
period. They are clumsy and inartificial. They have there- 
fore been detected long ago by the test of fair criticism. 
But the book of Acts has stood this test, unshaken. It was 
reserved indeed for Hegelianism to expose its alleged preten- 


3 Introduction, 1868, ut supra, vol. ii. pp. 280, 282. 


Criticism 
on this 
change, 


282 LECTURE V. 


sions: a species of hypercriticism which would soon reduce 
the genuine histories of all antiquity to nonentities or 
forgeries. But we are confident that the credibility of the 
Acts will be universally acknowledged long after the negative 
criticism has vanished away like every temporary extrava- 
gance of unbridled reason, or rather of unbridled scepticism. 
If there were the least prospect of Baur’s opinion regarding 
the Acts becoming current, we should refer the reader to 
Kling,! who has satisfactorily exposed and refuted the 
attempt to give the history a mythic character, or in other 
words to reduce it to an apologetic fiction.° 


Now there are more than ordinary reasons for 
treating the work of Dr. Samuel Davidson with 
respectful deference. The venerable author is more 
than fourscore years of age, and is therefore pro- 
tected from the shafts of criticism. But truth de- 
mands from us a reverence more entire even than 
that which we owe to age; and when a critic of 
Dr. Davidson’s position is put forward as one of the 
few men among us who is free from prejudice, and 
whose opinion should therefore command our assent, 
it is clearly a duty which cannot be rightly avoided, 
to inquire what is the real value of that opinion. 

In the presence of the exaggerated estimate of 
German works on the New Testament so often made, 
not by German but by English writers, in deprecia- 
tion of the works of their countrymen, and the 
high estimate of Dr. Davidson’s work on the ground 
that it represents the latest result of German scholar- 


* Theologische Studien und Kri- 5. Ut supra, vol. ii. 1849, pp. 51, 
tiken, 1837, Heft ii. pp. 290-327. 52. 


LECTURE V. 283 


ship, the following extract from a review of the 
second edition of his new Introduction, by Dr. Emil 
Schiirer, is not unimportant. It will hardly be 
necessary to state that Dr. Schiirer does not write 
from the point of view of a conservative orthodoxy, 
or of belief in the Johannine authorship of the Fourth 
Gospel. The broad platform of the Literary Journal, 
which is edited by Dr. Schiirer in connexion with 
Dr. Harnack, and the high character of its articles, 
are known to all students :— 


Davidson was a student in Germany, and is well acquainted 
with German literature. He prizes it highly, almost too 
highly, even to the point of being unjust towards researches 
in his own country. For his summary rejection of all recent 
English commentaries on the New Testament (p. vi. imperfect, 
however, as are all English commentaries of recent origin) is 
not justified in view of Lightfoot’s valuable works. With 
his preference for German literature, he confines himself 
almost solely to the works of German theologians whom he 
mentions, and with whose views he deals. If it were not for 
the garb of a foreign language, one might often fancy that this 
book was written in Germany. The author has not, however, 
made very full reference to recent German literature. Among 
reviews, he chiefly uses Hilgenfeld’s Review of Scientific 
Theology, while other contributions to the subject of the New 
Testament which have lately appeared in German reviews are 
almost entirely ignored. In other ways his use of recent 
literature is very limited, although the survey as a whole is 
brought down to the latest date. This survey of recent 
literature, however, as well as several modifications in his 
own views, have necessitated various incidental changes in 
the present edition.® 


® Schiirer, Theologische Literaturzeitung, 1882, wt supra, No. 17, 
p. 394, 


by 
Schiirer. 


Both 
views 
cannot be 
right. 


His 
position 
between 
the two 
editions. 


284 LECTURE V. 


Dr. Davidson may have always been, and may 
now be, and it is not intended in the slightest degree 
to suggest that he has not been, or is not, a perfectly 
candid inquirer after truth, but his judgment may 
have been quite unconsciously warped by circum- 
stances, just as that of other men has been. If the 
Dr. Davidson of forty years ago, writing with so 
much preparation and with so many advantages of 
every kind, and with such a solemn sense of respon- 
sibility, was in any degree right in his views of the 
Fourth Gospel, then the Dr. Davidson of to-day is in 
the same degree wrong. It is a case of Hume and 
Mackintosh over again,’ and we are bound to form 
our own opinion as to which view is the correct one. 
It should be based upon a perusal of both works. To 
my own mind the earlier work has a calm dignity of 
strength which is absent from the later one; and 
for my own part I have little doubt that an en- 
tirely impartial mind, trained to examine and esti- 
mate evidence, would, if his reading were limited 
to the works of Dr. Samuel Davidson, decide in 
favour of the Johannine authorship. And in the 
case of Dr. Davidson, as in the case of Strauss,® 
much had passed between the two editions of his 
work. In the year 1857 he resigned the Professor- 
ship of Biblical Literature and Ecclesiastical His- 
tory in the Lancashire Independent College, ‘in 
consequence of an adverse vote of the managing 
committee, apparently founded upon the view of 


7 Cf. Lecture I. pp. 12 sq. 8 Cf. Lecture IV. p. 108. 


LECTURE. V; 285 


inspiration expressed in the second volume of the 
tenth edition of Horne’s Jntroduction,’® that is, upon 
a question of Old Testament criticism which had 
nothing whatever to do with the authenticity and 
genuineness of the Fourth Gospel or of any book of 
the New Testament. Dr. Davidson’s position in this 
controversy, especially in the attack which was made 
upon his scholarship,’ was one in which he deserved, 
and received, the full sympathy of his brother critics 
of all schools ; but it is impossible not to ask what 
would have been the result if the vote of the major- 
ity of the committee of the Lancashire Independent 
College had been a different one. It is impossible 
not to regret that Dr. Davidson has not given us 
more full reasons for his change of view in the 
almost numberless points in which that view has been 
changed; and it is impossible not to feel that the 
claim made by his friends*—I know of no occa- 
sion on which he has made any such claim for him- 
self—that he is the striking example of absolute 
freedom from bias, when compared with men whose 
scholarship and integrity and freedom from bias 
are certainly as little subject to question as his own, 
and whose position in criticism has been a well- 
ordered and consistent whole, is one which cannot 
be sustained. 

® Schaff- Herzog, Encyclopedia ; * See e.g. Atheneum, No. 
Supplement, p. 49. 3232, 5th October 1889, p. 448 ; 

1 See, e.g. Dr. Davidson, his Nineteenth Century, March 1889, 


Heresies, Contradictions, and Pla-  p. 468. 
giarisms, 1857, by two graduates. 


286 LECTURE V. 


The two 
latest 
critics : 


The second edition of Mr. Tayler’s essay, to 
which reference has been made in this lecture,? was 
published after his death under the editorial care of 
his. friend and successor Dr. James Martineau ; but 
the work has no important additions from the editor’s 
hand. Dr. Martineau’s remarkable position in the 


Dr. James 
Marti- 
neau, 
1805- 
regard of this generation of thinkers has been gained 
on the field of philosophy and ethics, rather than on 
that of criticism or exegesis ; but between the years 
1872 and 1875, he published a series of papers in a 
New England monthly periodical,* which included 
some essays on the Fourth Gospel. The series was 
not completed, because the periodical itself came to 
an end, and occupation with the important works 
which have in the meantime been given to us and 
have met with most thankful acceptance, has hitherto 
prevented their author from presenting them in a 
finished and a permanent form. 


aeons: But during the interval which has occurred in 


ral posi- 


aad this course of lectures, in consequence of the arrange- 


ment of the University terms, Dr. Martineau has 
published a volume on authority in religion, which 
is largely a re-working of the earlier papers, and 
includes some sections on the writings that are com- 
monly ascribed to ὃ. John.” The author discloses 


5 Supra, pp. 266 sq. 

4 Old and New, Boston. The 
papers on the Fourth Gospel were 
published in the numbers for July 
and August, 1874, vol. x. pp. 47- 
58 and 201-222. 

The motto of the magazine is 


suggestive : ‘The New does not 
supplant the Old, but completes 
it.’—Everett. 

5 Martineau: The Seat of Au- 
thority in Religion, 1890, pp. 189- 
243 and 509-12. 


LECTURE V. 287 


his position in the preface, which tells us ‘ that, 
under such guidance as that of Scholten, Hatch, 
Pfleiderer, Holtzmann, Harnack, and Weizsiicker,® 
even a veteran student may find it possible, with 
no very wide reading, to readjust his judgments to 
the altered conditions of the {1π|6. 7 And of these 
writers it would seem, if we may judge by results, 
that Scholten has been chief guide in so far as con- 
cerns the writings of 8. John. But it will be pos- 
sible to state Dr. Martineau’s conclusions very briefly 
and in his own words. 

On the unity of composition he thinks :— 

Whether or not it rightly bears the name of the apostle 
John, it is, at all events, free from the doubts and complica- 
tions arising from the process of growth out of prior materials 
of different dates: it needs no analysis into component 
elements ; it is plainly a whole, the production of a single 
mind,—a mind imbued with a conception of its subject con- 


sistent and complete, and not less distinct for being mystical 
and of rare spiritual depth.’ 


On the power of detecting the author by the 
writing, he says :-— 


No such divination is possible; and wherever a critic 
pretends, by the mere keenness of his unaided eye, to have 
detected the writer in some unheard-of quarter,—like the 
Ziirich scholar who made out that this very Gospel was 
certainly the production of Apollos,°—we justly look on the 


6 But cf. Weizsicker’s view of 8 Op. cit. p. 189, and Article in 
the Fourth Gospel as stated in Old and New, ut supra, p. 47. 
this lecture, supra, p. 257. ° ‘Die Evangelienfrage, Denk- 

7 Seat of Authority, ut supra,  schrift, Ziirich, 1858.’ Cf. supra, 
Preface, p. vi. pp. 249 sq. 


His views 
on the 
unity of 
composi- 
tion. 


Author. 


External 
evidence. 


288 LECTURE V. 


pretension as audacious, and its proofs as a waste of ingenuity. 
We are absolutely dependent, for the first suggestion of an 
author’s rame, on the witnesses who speak of it; and any 
disabilities attaching to these witnesses must seriously affect 
our reliance on their reports, and throw a greater burden on 
the internal confirmatory proofs. The primary and substan- 
tive evidence is testimonial; which, once given, may gain 
weight by various congruities, or lose it by incongruities in 
the writing itself; but which, if not given, can be replaced 
by neither.’ 


The results of the external testimony are stated 
as follows :— 


Can we, then, sum up the testimony of our witnesses to 
any definite result? From various quarters the line of their 
evidence seems to converge upon one time for the origin of 
this Gospel. [Probably] not known to Justin (about 155), 
but possibly to the author of the Clementines (about 170) ; 
not in the hands of Valentinus (about 160), but in those of 
his disciples, Ptolemzeus and Herakleon (180 and 190); not 
used by Marcion (about 150), but by Marcionites of the next 
generation; cited by Apollinaris (about 175); for the first 
time named by Theophilus of Antioch (about 180); the 
fourth Gospel would seem to have become known in the 
sixth or seventh decade of the second century, and to have 
ceased to be anonymous in the eighth. Time must be 
allowed, prior to these dates, for its gradual distribution from 
the place of its nativity to the literary centres of the church 
and of the Gnostic sects. But even the most liberal allow- 
ance, which, consistently with the habits of the age and the 
organization of Christendom, can be claimed for this purpose, 
will leave us a long way from the apostolic generation. We 
cannot confidently name any earlier date than the fifth 
decade of the century. [This conclusion will not be affected, 


1 Seat of Authority, wt supra, p. 191 ; and Article, p. 48. 


LECTURE V. 289 


even if we allow Justin to have had the Gospel in his 
hands.” | 


Turning to the internal evidence, Dr. Martineau 
Says =< 

[The conclusion seems forced upon us, that the Apostolical 
authorship of the fourth Gospel receives no adequate support 


from either claim on its own part, or competent external 
testimony.* | 


And, again :— 


These several features do not encourage us to look for the 
fourth evangelist anywhere within the circle of the twelve; 
and against his identification with John in particular special 
objections force themselves upon us from his recorded 
character.* 


On the relation to the Apocalypse, our author 
willingly embraces Vischer’s theory—that this writ- 
ing is a Christian overworking of an original Jewish 
document—which obtained considerable acceptance 
in 1886 through Harnack’s testimony,’ and concludes 
that :— 


[It cannot therefore have been issued before a.p. 136, 
and is altogether post-apostolic. .. . 


2 Op. cit. p. 208; Article, p. 
58. The portions in the text 
marked thus [ ] are not in the 
Article. 


5. Op. cit. p. 211. Not in the 
Article. 
4 Op. cit. pp. 216 sq. ‘These 


several features do not forbid us 
to look for the fourth evangelist 
anywhere within the circle of 
the twelve; and against his 


identification with John in par- 
ticular special objections force 
themselves upon us from the re- 
corded character and extant book 
of this apostle.’ Article, ut supra, 
p. 206. 

° Die Offenbarung Johannis 
eine Jiidische Apokalypse in 
Christlicher Bearbeitung; mit 
einem Nachwort von A. Harnack, 
1886.’ 


Π 


Internal 
evidence. 


The Apo- 
calypse. 


The Pas- 
chal con- 
troversy. 


The 
*‘ Marks of 
Time.’ 


290 LECTURE V. 


What then is the effect of the new discovery (if such it 
be) respecting the Apocalypse or the question of authorship 
for the fourth Gospel ? Simply this: the Apocalypse is put 
out of court altogether as a witness in the case. Stripped of 
its own apostolic pretension, it has nothing to say either for 
or against that of the Gospel: and the old-argument against 
either from its violent contrast with the other can no longer 
be pressed.°* | 


On the Paschal controversy his remarks lead to 
the statement :— | 


Here, then, is the whole authority of the Apostle John, 
his personal habit, and the usage which formed itself under 
his influence, brought to bear against the historical statement 
and doctrinal conception of the fourth Gospel. How could 
this be, if at Smyrna, at Ephesus, and throughout the region 
where his name was a power, that Gospel had been current 
as his legacy, and its representation of the last earthly days of 
Christ had been received as accredited by him? ‘The features 
of his life and thought which these traditions preserve are 
precisely what this Gospel resists and banishes.’ 


When he considers the ‘Marks of Time,’ he 
thinks :— 


Not only is the evangelist other than the apostle [and 
other than the Ephesian John of the Apocalypse]: he plainly 
belongs to another age. He uses a dialect, and speaks in 
tones, to which the first century was strange, and which 
were never heard till a generation born in the second was in 
mid-life.® 

From all quarters, then, does evidence flow in, that the 
only Gospel which is composed and not merely compiled and 

® Seat of Authority, ut supra, 8 Op. cit. p. 236; Article, p. 
p. 227. 217. The portions in [ ] are not 


7 Op. cit. p. 235; and Article, in the Article. 
p. 217. 


LECTURE V. 291 


edited, and for which, therefore, a single writer is responsible, 
has its birthday in the middle of the second century, and is 
not the work of a witness at all.? 


Later in the work he discusses briefly the rela- 
tion of the First Epistle to the Gospel, his opinion 
being :— 

[But though long held in suspense by the apparent 
equipoise of the evidence for and against their identity of 
origin, | am at last more impressed by a few fundamental 
differences of religious conception pervading the two writings, 
than by several agreements in terminology and secondary 


categories of thought, which point to some common relation 
to the same school.'] 


It would be quite unnecessary to criticize the 
results at which Dr. Martineau has arrived, even if 
it were consistent with our purpose to do so. They 
represent the negative standpoint of twenty years 
ago as seen in Mr. Tayler’s work, with the fresh 
lights of Scholten and others, whose names Dr. 
Martineau has told us. We do not need to be 
reminded that these results would be fatal to some 
of the chief positions” of other leaders of the negative 
criticism which we have already considered ; nor yet 
that Dr. Martineau’s guides are not the only or the 
most important authorities of the last twenty years 


9 Op. cit. p. 242; Article, ρα then the whole series of argu- 


221. ments against the authorship of 
1 Op. cit. p. 509. Not in ὑπὸ the Gospel on the ground of the 
Article. differences between these writings 


* If, for example, the Apo- would be cancelled. 
calypse is not the work of 8S. John, 


The First 
Epistle. 


Dr. Hugo 
Delff, 
1840- 


LECTURE V. 


upon the subject of the Fourth Gospel. It is a serious 
defect that this veteran thinker has not allowed 
other lights also to fall upon his pages. 

Dr. Martineau is not, moreover, the only writer on 
the philosophy of religion who has lately directed his 
attention to criticism, and has given us the mature 
results of his studies during this Easter vacation. 

Dr. Hugo Delff, who had before written several 
treatises on religious and philosophical subjects, pub- 
lished last year a work on the History of Jesus of 
Nazareth,? and has now completed the statement of 
his views by a special essay on the Fourth Gospel.‘ 
He has certainly devoted considerable attention to the 
chief authorities on the subject, which he has studied 
both in the Hebrew and the Greek sources ; and he 
is not lacking in confidence as to the results. He 
cannot indeed understand—it is nothing short of 
ridiculous—-that men had not long ago seen that 
which is so simple and obvious now that he has seen 
it. The parallel which occurs to him is that of 
Columbus and the egg.” Nor will he have it called 


3 Die Geschichte des Rabbi Jesus 
von Nazareth. No date. Pref. 
Pfingsten, 1889. See esp. pp. 
67-207. 

4 Das vierte Evangelium, em 
authentischer Bericht wiber Jesus 
von Nazareth  wiederhergestellt, 
dibersetzt wnd erklirt, 1890. Vor- 
bericht, ‘im Miirz.’ 

5 ‘Wir haben nun also hier 
aus bester Quelle erfahren, dass 
unser Verfasser ein Jude aus 


priesterlichem oder hohepriester- 
lichem Geschlecht, und nicht der 
Apostel Johannes war. Das Neue 
und zwar je einfacher, je niher 
legend, also je frappanter es ist, 
erscheint paradox. Aber man 
befreie sich nur vom Vorurtheil, 
zwinge sich, mit Unbefangenheit, 
mit Objectivitit zu sehen und zu 
lesen, so wird es einleuchtend. 
Ks ist zwar licherlich, dass man 
nicht lingst das Richtige erkannt 


bo 
Le) 
9 


LECTURE V. 


a theory: it is nothing short of a historical dis- 
covery.° 

Our philosophers are agreed in the fullest assur- 
ance that no word of the Fourth Gospel can be 
rightly assigned to the Apostle John ; but here their 
agreement begins and ends. | 

One thinks that ‘. we are thrown upon the 
remains of popular tradition collected by our syn- 
optists,’ . which ‘cannot pretend to carry the 
guarantee of known and nameable eye-witnesses.’ ‘ 
The other thinks that he has vindicated the Fourth 
Gospel as the work of an eye-witness and ‘the one 
historical title-deed of Christianity.’ ὃ 

Dr. Martineau is quite certain that the work is by 
one writer, whoever he may be.? Dr. Delff is not 
less satisfied that, in addition to the universally recog- 
nized interpolations, in which he includes the twenty- 
first chapter, he can detect a number of smaller ones, 
and several very considerable sections, which are no 
part of the original.' 


hat. Aber das KEinfachste ist Die 


immer das Schwerste, das Nachst- 
legende das Entfernteste; es 
geht wie mit dem Hi des Columbus. 
Auch rihrt die mangelnde Ein- 
sicht daher, dass bisher fast nur 
Theologen sich mit diesen Fragen 


Kpigonenthums gewesen.’ 
Geschichte, ut supra, p. 72. 

δ “Meine Auffassung ist also 
keine Hypothese . . . sondern ein 
historischer Fund.’ Das vierte 
Evangelium, u.s.w., ut supra, 
Vorbericht, p. vii. 


beschaftigt haben, also Solche, 
die entweder als Verfasser durch- 
aus den Apostel Johannes haben 
wollten, oder Einen, der nicht 
nur nicht Apostel, sondern auch 
nicht einmal Augenzeuge, sondern 
dogmatischer Speculant spiitesten 


7 Martineau, ut supra, p. 249. 

8 Delff, Das vierte Evangeliwm, 
ut supra, p. 1. 

9 Ut supra, p. 189. 

' “Tn meiner ‘‘Geschichte des 
Rabbi Jesus” habe ich nach- 
gewlesen, dass das vierte Evan- 


Views of 
these 
critics on 


eye- 
witness, 


unity, 


period, 


subjective 
criticism, 


294 LECTURE V. 
Dr. Martineau regards it as established that the 
writer of the Fourth Gospel ‘uses a dialect, and 
speaks in tones, to which the first century was 
strange, and which were never heard till a genera- 
tion born in the second was in mid-life ;’?... ‘not 
till we listen to the Apologists, in the time of the 
Antonines, does this new language fall upon the 
ear.’ ° Dr. Delff thinks it to be clear that the work 
is distinctly the product of Judaism ; that it belongs 
to Jerusalem, when the sacred city was still standing ; 
and that its special purpose was not that the heathen, 
or even the Jews, in a wide sense, but that the class 
to which the writer belonged—the rulers, the chief 
priests—should believe.’ 

Dr. Martineau thinks that ‘wherever a critic pre- 
tends, by the mere keenness of his unaided eye, to 
have detected the author in some unheard-of quarter, 

. we justly look on the pretension as audacious, 
and its proofs as a waste of ingenuity.’® Dr. Delff 
regards the theory that the author was a person 
named John, a dweller in Jerusalem, of high-priestly 
rank,° who became a disciple of Jesus, and after the 
20, 11—19.’ Das vierte Evan- 


gelium, ut supra, p. 11. Cf. Ge- 
schichte, ut supra, pp. 97 sqq. 


gelium in der Gestalt, in der es 
in den Kanon aufgenommen ist, 
ausser den allgemein anerkannten 


Interpolationen : 5, 4. 7, 53—8, 
12 und Cap. 21 noch verschiedene 
andre enthalt, und zwar kleinere 
die folgenden: 2, 17. 21. 22. 4, 
44. 6, 44. 54. 7, 39. 12, 16. 33. 13, 
20—groéssere 1, 1—6 und 9—19. 
2,1—11. 4. 46—fin. 5, 19—30. 
6, 1—30, 37—40. 59. 12, 26—31. 


> Ut supra, p. 236. 

$ Ibid. p. 237. 

* Das vierte Evangelium, ut 
supra, pp. vill, ix. 

> Ut supra, p. 191. 


δ. But cf. Weizsaicker, Das 
Apostolische Zeitalter, 1890, p. 
500. 


LECTURE V. 295 


destruction of Jerusalem found his way to Asia Minor 
and became in the recollections of the next generation 
the ‘presbyter John,’ but is wholly distinct from the 
Apostle John, as his own discovery, which solves the 
chief problems, not only of the Fourth Gospel, but 
of Christianity itself. 

But I need not weary you with the details. Our 
philosophical critics of to-day are not unlike the more 
ordinary critics who have gone before. [15 not too 
much to assert that while they agree that the Gospel 
is not written by the Apostle John, they not only 
differ, but they are diametrically opposed as to every 
fact and every reason upon which that opinion is 
supported. 


Here our sketch of the history of the negative 
criticism of the Fourth Gospel, which, imperfect as 
it has necessarily been, may, I fear, seem to have 
been unduly extended in proportion to our time, 
must be brought to a close. We may not now pause 
to characterize it, as a whole or in its separate parts. 
The words of our text are :— 


And not even so did their witness agree together. 


We will in the next lecture consider, in so far as 
its limits will permit, the position of modern positive 
criticism in relation to our subject. 


7 Das vierte Evangelium, wt supra, p. 1. 


compared, 
and found 
to be 
diametri- 
cally 
opposed. 


Conclu- 
sion. 


ὦ ἢ 
Vi Wy 
|" bal bp 
uy Me 
aA A es he 
Φ ΟῚ ἣν md fo? 


Ce ie ove 


‘OUR, AGH? 


THE POSITIVE CRITICISM 


‘IF THE SUBJECT BE EXTENSIVE——IF IT BE ONE OF THE GREAT DEPART- 
MENTS INTO WHICH HUMAN KNOWLEDGE |S DIVIDED——-A CAREFUL STUDY OF 
IT, CONTINUED FOR SEVERAL YEARS, OR EVEN FOR A LARGE PART OF A 
LIFE, COMBINED WITH FREQUENT MEDITATION, AND, IF POSSIBLE, PERSONAL 
OBSERVATION, ΙΒ REQUISITE IN ORDER TO ENABLE A MAN TO UNDERSTAND 
IT THOROUGHLY AND TO TREAT IT WITH A SOUND AND COMPREHENSIVE 
JUDGMENT. ALL THE GREAT LUMINARIES OF SCIENCE, WHETHER MATHE- 
MATICAL, PHYSICAL, METAPHYSICAL, ETHICAL, OR POLITICAL, HAVE FULFILLED 
THIS CONDITION. NONE OF THEM WOULD HAVE ACQUIRED THE AUTHORITY 
WHICH THEIR OPINIONS, AS: SUCH, INDEPENDENTLY OF THEIR REASONS, 
POSSESS. IF THEY HAD NOT APPLIED ALL THEIR MENTAL FACULTIES 
DURING A LARGER PART OF THEIR LIVES TO THE SUBJECTS ON WHICH 
THEY AWROKE. ᾿ς 

*THE AGREEMENT OF COMPETENT JUDGES UPON A SPECULATIVE OPINION 
ΙΒ ANALOGOUS TO THE AGREEMENT OF CREDIBLE WITNESSES IN THEIR 
TESTIMONY TO A FACT, THE VALUE OF THEIR CONCURRENT TESTIMONY IS 
MORE THAN TEN TIMES THE VALUE OF THE TESTIMONY OF EACH.“ SO 
THE JOINT PROBABILITY OF THE AGREEMENT OF TEN COMPETENT JUDGES 
IN A RIGHT OPINION IS FAR GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PROBA- 
BILITIES OF THE RECTITUDE OF THE OPINION OF EACH TAKEN SEPAR- 
ATELY.” . uy 

. . +» » ‘REASON DOES NOT FORBID, BUT PRESCRIBES A RELIANCE UPON 
AUTHORITY. WHERE A PERSON Ι5. NECESSARILY IGNORANT OF THE 
GROUNDS OF DECISION, TO DECIDE FOR HIMSELF IS AN ACT. OF SUICIDAL 
FOLLY. HE OUGHT TO RECUR TO A COMPETENT ADVISER, AS A _ BLIND 
MAN RELIES UPON A GUIDE.’ 


Cornewall Lewis. 


* Cf. Campbell, p. 52. 


LECTURE VI. 


At the mouth of two witnesses or three shall every word be established. — 
2 Cor, ‘xit.. 1. 


We have already felt how impossible it is within 
the limits of two lectures to draw even a brief out- 
line of the negative criticism of this century, and it 
certainly would not be easy, within the limits of 
one, to trace with anything like fulness the suc- 
cession of thinkers who have been led by the attack 
upon the Fourth Gospel to examine the position of 
their opponents, and to re-examine the grounds of 
their own convictions; and who, as a result of this 
testing process, have maintained and strengthened 
their belief in the Johannine authorship. I am the 
less careful however to present in its fulness this part 
of our subject, as even a cursory examination of it 
must show how strong the position is, and I shall 
willingly content myself with a reference to some 
representative thinkers. 


The immediate results of the works of Evanson 
and Bretschneider have been sufficiently before us, 
and I pass therefore at once to consider the witness 
of Schleiermacher. 


Friedrich Schleiermacher had already made his 


Introduc- 
tion. 


Schleier- 
macher, 
1768-— 
1834. 


His posi- 
tion, 


influence, 


and 
character. 


300 LECTURE VL 


mark when the University of Berlin was founded in 
1810, and after taking a leading part in its organization 
became in name the first Professor, and in reality the 
most important living teacher, of Theology. De Wette 
was at first (from 1810 to 1819) his colleague in the 
new University, and among his pupils were Bleek, 
Liicke, Neander, Nitzsch, Ullmann, Julius Miiller, and 
for a time Strauss. ‘This is not the place to speak of 
the far-reaching extent of Schleiermacher’s work and 
influence, which have left perhaps, if all things are 
considered, a deeper and wider impression than those 
of any man in this century. The Life and Letters of 
the modern Plato have been placed within our reach 
and help us to realize something at least of what the 
man was.’ If you would know Schleiermacher, 
read, for example, the youth’s letter to his father, 
when passing through a crisis of faith which but for 
the son’s confidence and the father’s affection might 
have shattered his life.* Meditate upon the man’s 
declaration to his friend Jacobi, ‘ Understanding and 
feeling in me also remain distinct, but they touch 
each other and form a galvanic pile. To me it seems 
that the innermost life of the spirit consists in the 
galvanic action thus produced in the feeling of the 
understanding and the understanding of the feeling, 
during which, however, the two poles always remain 


1 Jonas u. Dilthey, Aus Schleier- 1860. Dilthey, Leben Schleier- 
macher’s Leben in Briefen, 4 vols. | macher’s, 1867. 
1858-61 ; the earlier part in Eng- 2 Life, by F. Rowan, i. pp. 46 
lish by Frederica Rowan, 2 vols. 566. Cf. Dilthey, Leben, pp. 23 sqq. 


LECTURE VI. 301 
deflected from each other.’* Be present for a moment 
at the final gathering of the family on earth. He has 
been racked for days by acute sufferings. He says :— 
‘Inwardly I enjoy heavenly moments. I feel con- 
strained to think the profoundest speculative thoughts, 
and they are to me identical with the deepest religious 
feelings.’ He pronounced the words of consecration 
at the Holy Communion immediately before his 
death, and added :—‘ On these words of the scrip- 
ture I rely; they are the foundation of my faith. 
. . . In this love and communion we are, and ever 
will remain, united.’* Such was the man, Friedrich 
Schleiermacher. 

Schleiermacher was a theologian and a philosopher 
rather than an expert in biblical criticism, and was 
concerned with the present rather than with the past, 
and with the contents of the Bible rather than with its 
form; but in the early part of his literary life, he 
had devoted attention to the criticism of some of the 
books of the New Testament, and that in a spirit of 
extreme freedom.? One result of this, well known 
to English readers, is the Crztical K'ssay on the Gospel 
of S. Luke.6 Another result, which is not so well 
known, is his work on the frst Epistle to Timothy.’ 


3 See the whole letter in Life, 
by F. Rowan, 11. pp. 280-84. Cf. 
Lichtenberger, Histoire des idées 
religieuses, tom. il. p. 66. 

4 Life, ut supra, 11. pp. 337-39. 
Cf. Histoire, ut supra, 11. pp. 
237-38. 

° Cf. Reden θεν die Religion, 


ed. i. 1799. 

6. Critical Essay on the Gospel of 
S. Luke, with Introduction by the 
translator (Mr. Connop Thirlwall, 
afterwards Bishop of S. David's), 
1825. 

7 Ueber den sogenannten ersten 
Brief des Paulos an den Timotheos, 


His 
writings. 


Free 
treatment 
of New 
Testa- 
ment, 


Special 
views on 
the Fourth 
Gospel. 


302 LECTURE VI. 


And this free treatment of the New Testament writ- 
ings was continued in his later studies, for we find 
him in effect giving up also the Apostolic authorship 
of the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Hebrews, 
the Second and Third Epistles of John, the Second 
Epistle of Peter, and the Epistles of James and Jude. 
While doubtful about the Acts of the Apostles and 
the Synoptics, and most doubtful of all about the 
Apocalypse,® he takes the position that the Johannine 
Christ is the true historic Christ, and that the Syn- 
optic sketches are to be corrected from this picture. 
Christianity would be a phenomenon without explana- - 
tion if it were founded only on the Synoptic Gospels. 
His special views on the Fourth Gospel appear first in 
a series of Hxplanations appended to the third edition 
of the Discourses on Religion, which was published 
in 1821, at the height of the excitement caused by 
Bretschneider’s Probabilia. In one of these Lxplana- 
tions, which comes at the end of the fifth discourse, 
he says :— 

Nothing can well betray less appreciation of the essence 
of Christianity and of the person of Christ Himself, and espe- 
cially less historic sense and comprehension of the way in 
which great events come to pass and the conditions in which 
they must find their real basis, than the opinion which was 
some time ago quietly introduced—that John had mingled 


much of his own ideas with the discourses of Christ. Now, 
however, that this view has secretly strengthened and fortified 


1807. Stimmtliche Werke, Abth. Werke, 1845, Abth. i. Bd. 8, pp. 
i. Zur Theologie, Bd. 2. 315-344. 
S Hinleitung ins Neue Testament. 


LECTURE VI. 303 


itself and adopted critical weapons, it risks the more destruc- 
tive assertion, that John did not write the Gospel, but that it 
was a later author who invented this mythical Christ. But 
how it could be possible for a Jewish Rabbi, with humani- 
tarian sentiments, a somewhat Socratic system of ethics, a few 
miracles (or, at least, what others took for miracles), and a 
talent for introducing happy maxims and parables—for when 
we have said this we haye said all, indeed he will have to be 
forgiven a few follies according to the other Evangelists— 
how a man like this could have produced such an influence as 
a new religion and Church—for such a man, had he existed, 
would not have been worthy to be compared to Moses and 
Mahomet—all this is left to our own comprehension. Yet 
the issue must be a critical battle, for which those who 
love and reverence the Johannine Son of God are doubtless 
already arming themselves.°® 


In Schleiermacher’s /ntroduction to the New Testa- 
ment * he bases the Apostolic authorship of the Fourth 
Gospel on the consistency of the presentation, and 
sweeps away any difficulties in detail by the strength 
of the impression as a whole—Die Macht des Total- 
Eindruckes, as he was wont to say.2. These principles 


° Reden εἶδον die Religion. gelium zusammen gestellt sind, 


Werke, Abth. i. Bd. 1, 1843, pp. 
447 sq. ; and the critical edition of 
1879, pp. 297 sq. This is by G. C. 
b. Piinjer, who gives a concise and 
interesting account of the different 
editions in his Introduction. 

1 Hinleitung, ut supra, pp. 315- 
944. 

* * Hs ist also recht gut, dass 
diese Sache einmal zur Sprache 
gebracht ist, und alle Zweifels- 
grinde gegen das Johannesevan- 


und soscheint es auch Bretschnei- 
der gemeint zu haben, der seine 
Hypothese spiter so gut wie 
zuruck genommen hat. Aber dass 
unter diesen Hinzelheiten irgend 
Etwas von solcher Erheblichkeit 
sel, dass man gegen den Total- 
eindruck des ganzen die Aecht- 
heit bezweifeln miisste, wird 
wohl Niemand mehr meinen.’ 
Kinleitung, wt supra, p. 840. Cf. 
p. 315. 


Johannine 
author- 
ship 
upheld 
through- 
out. 


Neander, 
1789- 
1850. 


304 LECTURE VI. 


were further illustrated in the author’s Life of Jesus,’ 
where he goes so far as to assert that to the Johannine 
Gospel must be given the priority of time * as well as 
of position ; indeed it became almost an axiom of 
Schleiermacher and his school, that the Fourth 
Gospel was beyond question ; and that if discrepancy 
should ever be established between it and the Syn- 
optics, the former was to be at all costs accepted. 


Among the youths of Germany who felt the wave 
of the great influence which was exercised by Schlei- 
ermacher’s Discourses on Religion was David Mendel, 
the son of a Jewish pedlar, who was living at Ham- 
burg with a poor and worse than widowed mother, 
and was supported at the gymnasium by the liberality 
of friends. Of this lad, when grown to manhood, 
a living writer whose special knowledge and judy- 
ment give him every right to command our confi- 
dence, says that he was ‘the most original pheno- 
menon in the literary world of this nineteenth cen- 
tury,’° and general opinion has held him to be father 
of the modern philosophic, as distinguished from the 
previous dogmatic, history of the Church. Trained 
Evangelien nur erst zerstreut und 


wurden erst spiiter gesammelt.’ . . 
Leben Jesu, ut swpra, p. 420. Cf. 


3 Das Leben Jesu, 1832, ed. 
Riitenik, 1864. Werke, Abth. i. 
Bd. 6, pp. 87-44. This ‘ Lecture’ 


on the Quellen was delivered on 
May 23, 1832. 

4 *Sehen wir aber die Sache so 
an: das Evangelium Johannis ist 
das erste, zu der Zeit als Johannes 
sein Evangelium schrieb, existir- 
ten die Bestandtheile der anderen 


Strauss, Der Christus des Glaubens 
u.s.w. Kritik des Schleiermacher’- 
schen Lebens Jesu, 1865, pp. 45 
sqq. 

5 Schaff, Germany; its Uni- 
versities, Theology, and Religion, 
1857, p. 270. 


LECTURE VI. 305 


to be a jurist, he was being fashioned as a historian ; 
brought up in Judaism, he was being prepared to 
teach the history of the development of Christianity. 

In his seventeenth year David Mendel carried his 
convictions into practice by being publicly baptized 
in Hamburg, and, true to the ancient custom of his 
race, signified the change of being by a change of the 
From Feb- 
ruary 25, 1806, onwards he was no longer a Jew, 
Mendel, but a new man in Christ Jesus, Neander 
(Newman ).° 

Of the special qualifications of this Christian-Jew 
to judge of a Christian-Jewish writing, of his minute 


name which distinguished that being. 


acquaintance with Gnosticism and. the philosophies of 
the second century which engaged his attention from 
the first,’ of his trained historical mind and vast his- 
torical knowledge, of his whole-hearted devotion to 
his studies and his students during the thirty-eight 
years of his professoriate in Berlin, it is hardly ne- 
cessary to make mention. Such was the general 
fitness of Neander to form an opinion upon the Fourth 
If we remember also that he commenced 


Gospel. 


his work in Berlin in 1813 by a course of ‘ Lectures 


Ὁ As many variations occur in nesses (Taufzeugen). 


the accounts, it may be well to 
refer to the original entry in the 
baptismal register of the church of 
St. Catharine, Hamburg, which 
is quoted by Krabbe, August Ne- 
ander, 1852, p.18. The Christian 
names chosen, Johann, August, 
Wilhelm, were those of the wit- 


7 De fidei gnoseosque christiane 
idea. . . secundum mentem Cle- 
mentis Alex. Heidelberge, 1811. 
Genetische Entwickelung der vor- 
nehmsten gnostischen Systeme, 1818. 
Anti-Gnosticus: Geist des Tertul- 
lianus u. Hinleitung in dessen 
Schriften, 1825. 


xX 


Change of 
name. 


Special 
qualifica- 
tions. 


His 
opinion. 


306 LECTURE VI. 


on ὃ. John,’ and completed it in 1850 by announcing 
from his deathbed a course of ‘ Lectures on the Gospel 
of S. John,’ and that he prepared with scrupulous 
care four editions of his Life of Jesus, extending from 
1837 to 1845—the significance of these years will be 
borne in mind—we shall be prepared to value rightly 
the following statement about the Fourth Gospel :— 


It could have emanated from none other than that 
‘beloved disciple’ upon whose soul the image of the Saviour 
had left its deepest impress. So far from this Gospel’s having 
been written by a man of the second century (as some assert), 
we cannot even imagine a man existing in that century so 
little affected by the contrarieties of his times, and so far 
exalted above them. Could an age involved in perpetual 
contradictions, an age of religious materialism, anthropo- 
morphism, and one-sided intellectualism have given birth to 
a production like this, which bears the stamp of none of these 
deformities? How mighty must the man have been who, in 
that age, could produce from his own mind such an image of 
Christ as this? And this man, too, in a period almost desti- 
tute of eminent minds, remained in total obscurity! Was it 
necessary for the master-spirit, who felt in himself the capacity 
and the calling to accomplish the greatest achievement of his 
day, to resort to a pitiful trick to smuggle his ideas into cir- 
culation ? 

And then, too, while it is thought sufficient to say of the 
three other Gospels that they were compiled from undesigned 
fables, we are told that such a Gospel as this of John was the 
work of sheer invention, as lately Dr. Baur has confessed, 
with praiseworthy candour. Strange that a man, anxious for 
the credit of his inventions, should, in the chronology and 
topography of his Life of Christ, give the le to the Church 
traditions of his time, instead of chiming in with them ; 
stranger still, that in spite of his bold contradiction of the 


LECTURE VI. 307 


opinions of his age in regard to the history, his fraud should 
be successful! In short, the more openly this criticism 
declares itself against the Gospel of John, the more palpably 
does it manifest its own wilful disregard of history.® 


One of Schleiermacher’s first colleagues and most 
intimate friends in the new University of Berlin, was 
Dr. Wilhelm de Wette, and no one of the band laboured 
more earnestly in the interests of rational theology 
and scientific conceptions of both the Old and the 
New Testaments. He had prepared a considerable 
work on the Pentateuch, which was anticipated by 
the publication of Vater’s Commentary in 1803, and 
was therefore published only in abstract, and as a 
supplement to Vater’s work. This, with other early 
essays, sufficiently shows the liberal point of view, 
to say the least, from which De Wette approached 
his studies. A letter of generous sympathy—more 
generous, perhaps, than wise—to the mother of Ludwig 
Sand, a student who in a passionate impulse of liberal 
patriotism had murdered one whom he thought to be 
an advocate of oppression, reveals the strong tendency, 
which runs all through De Wette’s work, to protect 
at any cost the weaker side, and to be held back by 
no reverence for conventionalities from that which 
seemed to him to be right. But that letter cost him 
his professor’s chair, and cost the young university 
one of its ablest men. In vain Schleiermacher and 
others pleaded for their colleague, in vain they pleaded 


8 Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, ed. 4, 1845, pp. 11, 12. Eng. 
Trans, 1851, pp. 7, 8. 


x. 2 


De Wette, 
1780- 
1849. 


Early 
essays. 


His 
character. 


Liberal 
views. 


The 
Johannine 
question. 


308 LECTURE VI. 
for the interests of the university. The autocratic king 
would hear of no excuse, and in 1819 De Wette left 
Berlin for a temporary retirement at Weimar, whence 
he was to be called in 1823 to Basel. Here for 
twenty-six years he devoted himself to the work of 
his professorship and to philanthropic labours, such 
as the formation of a ‘ Society for protecting the 


’ and was 


Greeks against the oppression of the Turks ; 
throughout a consistent leader of the party of pro- 
gress. He has sketched his own character in a novel, 
Theodore, or the Consecration of the Sceptic,®? which he 
wrote at Weimar in 1822, and to which Tholuck 
replied in the True Consecration of the Doubter." The 
late Dr. Schenkel, who was De Wette’s pupil, and 
had himself certainly no leanings to conservative 
orthodoxy, speaks of his memory with touching 
gratitude, and represents the leading principle of his 
theological labours to be that ‘truth in none of its 
relations of life, least of all in theology and the 
church, can exist without freedom, or freedom with- 
out truth.’ ? 

De Wette was in the thick of the discussion on 
the Johannine question through the whole period of 


Evanson, Bretschneider, Strauss, and Baur, and it is 


9 Theodor, oder des Zweiflers logieu. Kirche, dieWahrheit nicht 


Wethe, Berlin, 1822. 

1 Die Lehre von der Siinde u. 
vom Versihner, oder die wahre 
Weihe des Zweiflers, ed. 7, 1851, 
Hamburg. 

* “Dass in allen Verhiltnissen 
des Lebens, zumal aber in Theo- 


bestehen kann ohne die Freiheit, 
u. die Freiheit nicht ohne die 
Wahrheit.’ Schenkel, W. M. L. 
de Wette und die Bedeutung seimer 
Theologie fiir wnsere Zeit, 1849, p. 
111: 


LECTURE VI. 309 


natural to expect both that he should write on the 
subject, and that he should lean to the negative view. 
He did write on the subject, both in his /ntroduction 
to the New Testament, the editions of which extend 
from 1826 to 1848, and in his Concise Evxegetical 
Commentary, the editions of which extend from 1837 
to 1846.° 

In the first edition of the /ntroduction, when the 
effect of Bretschneider’s Probabilia was still strongly 
felt, De Wette was inclined to take a middle course, 
and to regard the authorship as not proven. After 
the publication of the theories of Strauss and 
Baur, and under the influence of Bleek’s Contri- 
butions to Criticism of the Gospels,* he became more 
conservative. | 

In the fifth edition of the Jntroduction, 1848, he 
says :— 

Τὸ will be found that 1 have placed myself decidedly more 
than heretofore among the defenders of the Gospel of John, 


although I am still far from being so decided as my friend 
Bleek. os 


And again :— 


A critical conclusion which denies to the Apostle John all 
share in this Gospel, and declares the same to be of later 
origin, not only involves the odious but inevitable confession 


3 Lehrbuch der historisch-kriti- Newen Testament: Johannes, ed. 
schen Hinleitung in die kanonischen 1, 1837 ; ed. 3, 1846. 
Biicher des Neuen Testaments, ed. * Cf. mfra, p. 314. 
1, 1826; ed. 5, 1848; Kurzge- > Preface to ed. 5, Eng. Trans. by 
fasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum  F¥rothingham, 1858, pp. viiand viii. 


The Intro- 
duction. 


The 
Commen- 
tary. 


Liicke, 
i761 
1855. 


The Berlin 
group. 


310 LECTURE VI. 


that the author was a forger, but is opposed by the impro- 
bability that Christian antiquity accepted a Gospel which 
differed in important points from the evangelic tradition 
without having found a sure and satisfactory ground in its 
apostolic authority.6.... 


And again in his Commentary :— 


The recognition of the Johannine authorship of our 
Gospel will even after the latest and most violent attacks 
never lose its hold in the Church, though it is to be hoped we 
shall learn to test the doubts which are brought against it 
with less prejudice; and criticism will as little solve the 
problem of explaining the mysterious origin of this Gospel 
as she will lift the veil which rests upon the early history of 
Christianity.” 


Another of the group of Schleiermacher’s pupils 
and friends was Dr. Gottfried Liicke, who joined him 
as a lecturer at Berlin in 1816, and was afterwards 
Professor of Theology in the new University of Bonn 
1818-27, and in Gottingen 1827-55. Liicke, in his 
Commentary,® which is known to all students of the 
Johannine writings, speaks of Schleiermacher as his 
‘spiritual father ;’° and reminds his old friend Hoss- 
bach of the scientific revolution caused by Schleier- 
macher, De Wette, and Neander, and of their studies 
together in the crisis which followed the year 
‘thirteen.’' And in De Wette’s Handbook to the 


® KHinleitung, ed. 5, Eng. Trans. des Evangelisten Johannes, 1820 ; 


1858, ut supra, Ὁ. 212. ed.*) 2, 1858: eds τ 9. partis. 
7 Handbuch zum Neuen Testa- 1840. 
ment, ed. 3, Bd. i. Th. 3, p. 9. ° Ibid. ed. 3, p. viii. 


ὃ Commentar wiber die Schriften ' Tord. p. vii. 


LECTURE VI. 31} 


New Testament, which is dedicated to Liicke, there is 
a touching reference to the good old days 
when we lived and worked and disputed together in Berlin, 


and often had the never-to-be-forgotten Schleiermacher in 
our midst.? 


Of Liicke’s Commentary, De Wette says with jus- 
tice that 


with the first appearance of this work began a new and 
better era of New Testament interpretation,® 


and to this day it remains the classic and unequalled 
Commentary on 8. John. The author did not con- 
fine himself to exegetical studies, but they had the 
chief attraction for him, and the opus magnum of his 
life was the interpretation of ὃ. John’s writings. He 
brought to his task stores of wide and accurate 
learning, and applied to it for the first time the 
principles and results of exact philological and gram- 
matical knowledge. But he never forgot that the 
religious sense is also a necessary qualification for un- 
derstanding a religious work. He is an artist, a poet, 
a mystic, as well as a grammarian, a philologer, a 
thinker. ‘No man,’ to use his own expression, ‘ can 
really seek, but the man who hopes to find’; and 
while others were forming theories of what the 
Fourth Gospel ought to have been and then making its 
facts agree with their theories, Liicke’s receptive spirit 
was really seeking, really finding, what the Fourth 
Gospel was ; and it was to him through the whole 


2 Handbuch, ed. 3, Johannes, Bd. i. Th. 3, Dedication. > Thid. 


The 
Commen- 
tary. 


The 
religious 
sense. 


Acquaint- 
ance with 
the newer 
theories. 


312 LECTURE VI. 


course of his investigations, as it was to Schleier- 
macher, ‘the chief, the most delicate, the most pro- 
found of all the Gospels.’ 4 

Not that Liicke remained ignorant of, or un- 
interested in, any of the newer theories. He dis- 
cusses the authorship and cognate questions with 
full reference to them.® Let his own words tell us 
his relation to these theories :— 


I have diligently used the newer exegetical works on 
the Gospel and have gladly learnt from them. I have also 
been careful to examine the more recent and critical treatises 
on its genuineness and authenticity, and as far as in me lies 
IT have honestly tested them. You will find that though 
IT am unshaken in my convictions I have at the same time 
gladly recognized truth and right on the opposite side. It 
is, indeed, no good to disguise from oneself and others weak 
points and defects in the historical and exegetical grounds of 
belief, when once they have made themselves felt. A hidden 
blemish is the most dangerous. Only the real and the true, 
only the perfectly sound can bear the searchings of faith and 
of knowledge. JI have therefore given up much in the 
interests of truth that seemed to me untenable, however dear 
it had become to me.° 


And again :— 


Where I have to learn from others I seek the truth and 
accept it, when once clearly shown, without caring whether 
the man with whom I find it be rationalist, pietist, or any- 
thing else, or whether he be my friend or my foe. That 
is my orthodoxy.’ 


* Cf. Lichtenberger, Histoire > Commentar, ed. 3, pp. 89- 
des idées religieuses, 1873, tom. ili. 246. 
pp. 124-5. 6 Ibid. ed. 3, pp. ix sq. 
* Ibid. p. xii. 


(9) 


LECTURE VI. 918 


The result of his investigations pursued in this 
spirit and with resources such as up to that time 
had certainly never been combined in any writer on 
the Fourth Gospel, and pursued, let us again remind 
ourselves, in the very midst of the negative criticism, 
when the impulse of the attack was felt as a living 
power and not merely as an abstract theory—the 
third edition from which I am quoting was published 
in 1840—is that Liicke accepts the common opinion 
that John was the author of the Fourth Gospel,® and 
that Ephesus is the place at which the Gospel was 
written ;° but thinks that there are no data by which 
the time can be fixed within nearer limits than from 
the seventh to the tenth decades of the first century ; 
and that it was not earlier than the year a.p. 80, but 
that how near it was to the death of the Apostle, 
cannot be definitely stated.! 


Dr. Friedrich Bleek was also, like Liicke, a pupil 
and friend of Schleiermacher, and, under his influence, 
began to lecture at Berlin in 1818. Five years later 
he obtained a professor’s chair there, but left it in 
1829 for the professorship at Bonn which furnished 
the work of his life. All men agree in their estimate 
of the massive solidity of Bleek’s learning and the 
absolute fairness of his judgment. ‘He seems to 
me,’ says the English essayist, who has himself shown 
the greatest mastery of Baur’s theory, ‘nearly the 


8 Commentar, ut supra, pp. 6-160. ® Ibid. pp. 161 sq. 
1 Ibid. p. 167. 


Result of 
his criti- 
cism. 


Bleek, 
1795- 
1859. 


Estimate 
of his 
powers. 


Earlier 


writings. 


The 


Beitrage. 


The 


Introdue- 


tion. 


314 LECTURE VI. 


only opponent of Baur I have met with worthy, 
both from his candour and his ability, to cope with 
him.’? These qualities were first fully appreciated 
when Dr. Bleek published an edition of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews.* He wrote for the Berlin Society 
for Scientific Criticism, in 1844, a review, which was 
published in that and the following year,* of Ebrard’s 
Scientific Criticism of the Gospel History.’ The review 
attracted considerable attention, for it contained sub- 
stantial additions to the subject, which was one that 
had occupied a prominent place in the writer’s winter 
course of professorial lectures. It was republished, 
in an enlarged form, in 1846, and dedicated to De 
Wette.® It deals principally with the Johannine ques- 
tion, and is justly regarded as an able, impartial, and 
convincing defence of the authenticity of the Gospel. 
De Wette acknowledges its effect upon himself.’ 
After Bleek’s death his lectures on /ntroduction to the 
New Testament® were edited by his son. The later 
editions? have been edited by Dr. Mangold.' The 
Johannine problem is treated with great fulness and 
erudition, and a portion of it has been published 


The additions of 


separately as a French treatise. 


7 R. H. Hutton, Theological 
Essays, ed. 3, 1888, p. 209. 

ἡ Brief an die Hebrder, 1828- 
36-40. 

* Jahrbiicher fiir wissenschaft- 
liche Kritik, 1844, Bd. ii. Nos. 
61-65 ; 1845, Bd. i. Nos. 41-46. 

ὅ Vide infra, p. 317. 

“ Beitriige zi  Evangelien- 


Kritik, 1846. 

7 Vide supra, p. 309. 

8 Einleitung in das Neue Testa- 
ment, ed. 1, 1860; ed. 2, 1866. 

9. Kd. 3, 1875; ed. 4, 1886. 

' Cf. Lecture V. p. 262. 

2 Ch. Bruston, Etude critique 
sur Pévangile selon Saint Jean, 
1864. 


LECTURE VI. 915 


Dr. Mangold bring the work up to the present date 
with an erudition which is in harmony with Bleek’s, 
though the opinion as to the authorship of the 
Fourth Gospel is not. He is not himself able, as we 
have seen, to accept the authenticity, because he 
feels the force of the objection on internal grounds ; 
but he bears abundant witness to the ability and 
candour of Bleek himself, who held throughout the 
Johannine authorship in the fullest sense. 


No man filled a more prominent place in the eyes 
of the churches, the nations, the philanthropists, the 
scholars of the last generation than the Baron de 
Bunsen. The pupil of Heyne and Lachmann; the 
early friend of Niebuhr and Neander, and in this 
country of Arnold, Maurice, Hare, and Stanley; the 
patron of Holtzmann and De Lagarde; himself a 
scholar, a theologian, a jurist, a statesman, a man of 
affairs, and in touch with the first minds of Europe ; 
a layman also, and one of singular freedom from 
prejudice—unless it be a prejudice for freedom—his 
opinion is of exceptional value both from his access 
to evidence, and his power of forming a judgment 
upon it. It is none other than Dr. Thomas Arnold 
who writes of Baron de Bunsen :— 

I could not express my sense of what Bunsen is without 
seeming to be exaggerating; but I think if you could hear 
and see him even for one half-hour, you would understand 
my feeling towards him. He is a man in whom God’s graces 


and gifts are more united than in any other person whom 1 
ever saw. I have seen men as holy, as amiable, as able; but 


Bunsen, 
1791— 
1860. 


Arnold’s 
opinion of 
im. 


Fourth 
Gospel a 
‘ cardinal 
point.’ 


316 LECTURE VI. 

I never knew one who was all three in so extraordinary a 
degree, and combined with a knowledge of things new and old, 
sacred and profane, so rich, so accurate, so profound, that I 
never knew it equalled or approached by any man.® 


And to Bunsen the authenticity of the Fourth 
Gospel is a cardinal point of faith. To him if there 
is no historic ὃ. John, there is no historic Christ, 
there is no Christianity :— 


If the Gospel of John is not an historical treatise by an 
eye-witness, but a myth, then there is no historical Christ, 
and without an historical Christ universal belief in Christ is 
a dream —all Christian knowledge hypocrisy or delusion, 
Christian reverence for God an imposture, and, finally, the 


Reformation a crime or madness.? 


3 Stanley, Life and Correspond- 
ence of Dr. Arnold, 1844, vol. ii. 


p. 137. 
4 <Tst das Evangelium des 
Johannes kein geschichtlicher 


Bericht des Augenzeugen, sondern 
ein Mythus, so gibt es keinen 
geschichtlichen Christus,und ohne 
einen geschichtlichen Christus ist 
aller gemeindliche Christenglaube 
ein Wahn, alles christliche Be- 
kenntniss Heuchelei oder Tau- 
schung, die christliche Gottes- 
verehrung eine Gaukelei, die 
Reformation endlich ein Verbre- 
chen oder ein Wahnsinn.’— V oll- 
stiindiges Bibelwerk, 1858, Bd. i. 
Vorwort, p. xX. 

I have not added the weighty 
authority of Credner to the list 
of those who support the Johan- 
nine authorship of the Fourth 


Gospel, though he does so in the 
strongest terms in his learned In- 
troduction (‘So ist doch aus diesen 
Streitigkeiten das Johanneische 
Evangelium nach _  bestandener 
Feuerprobe siegreich und gleich 
einem verjiingten Phoénix hervor- 
gegangen . . .”? Hinlettwng in das 
Neue Testament, 1836, p. 262), and 
maintains the view in his New 
Testament (Das Neue Testament, 
1847), because, in his posthumous 
History of the Canon, edited by 
Volkmar (cf. Lecture II. p. 57), 
he is said to have abandoned it. 
(‘Am misslichsten endlich steht es 
mit den dltesten Zeugnissen fiir 
das Ev. nach Matthdus u. nach 
Johannes.’ Geschichte des Neutes- 
tamentlichen Kanon, 1860, p. 6. 
See also references in Volkmar’s 
Register.) 


LECTURE VI. 517 


Dr. Johann Heinrich August Ebrard may be 
taken to represent the school of Erlangen, where he 
was born, and where, as well as at Ziirich, he was 
professor. Among his numerous writings are the 
following works on our present subject: Scientific 
Criticism of the Gospel History, which, as we have 
seen, gave rise to Bleek’s essay ; The Gospel of John 
and the latest Hypothesis on its Origin; The Revelation 
of John; The Epistles of John.’ All are both learned 
and able; and though as against an adversary his 
position is often weakened by excessive strength of 
language, it is always based upon a solid found- 
ation of knowledge. His conclusion with regard 
to the Fourth Gospel, after a careful examination 
of the evidence and a survey of the modern objec- 
Ons, 15: 

. . that, with the exception of some of Paul’s Epistles, no 
book can be found throughout the whole of the ancient 
literature, both Christian and profane, which can show such 


numerous and reliable proofs of its genuineness as the Gospel 
of John.® 


And again :— 

Till figs grow upon thistles, the genuineness of -the 
Gospel of John will continue firm and impregnable in 
the estimation of all who do not rank with the thistles 
themselves.’ 


° Wissenschaftliche Kritik der Johannis, 1853; Die Briefe Jo- 
evangelischen Geschichte, 1842, ed. hannis, 1859 ; Eng. Trans. 1860. 
3, 1868 ; Eng. Trans. 1863; Das 6 Gospel History, 1863, Eng. 
Evangelium Johannis und die ‘Trans. p. 598. 
neweste Hypothese tiber seine Entste- 7 Ibid. p. 600. 
hun 1845; Die Offenbarwig 


Kbrard, 
1818- 


Writings 
on the 
subject. 


Strong 
views on 
the Fourth 
Gospel, 


and on 
negative 
criticism. 


Tholuck, 
1799-— 
1877. 


Hengsten- 
berg, 
1808- 
1869. 


Their 
commen- 
taries 


318 LECTURE VI. 


His view of the negative criticism of the Gospel 
is summed up in these terms :— 

There was a time when Teller’s Lexicon was admired and 
esteemed by many contemporaries, as much as Zeller’s annuals 
are now. ‘There was a time when the way in which Paulus 
endeavoured to bring the consciousness of the age into har- 
mony with the writings of the New Testament was lauded as 
unparalleled in itsacuteness. There wasa time when Strauss’s 
mythical hypothesis appeared to shake the foundations of the 
world. But now Teller is laughed at; at the name of Paulus 
men shrug their shoulders; Strauss’s mythical hypothesis 
has been quietly laid aside as useless by the most kindred 
spirit, to make room for the hypothesis of a pious fraud. The 
time will come when men will not merely laugh, but shudder 
at such a hypothesis as this.® 


No sketch, however brief it may be, of the 
German positive criticism of the last half century, 
could omit the names of Tholuck of Halle, and 
Hengstenberg of Berlin; but I must refer to them 
only to pass by them. Men of wholly different 
characters, they were alike in this: that they 
exercised a very wide influence over successive 
generations of students and pastors at home and 
abroad—Tholuck, by the charm of his personal in- 
fluence, Hengstenberg, by the pages of the Lvangelical 
Church Journal’—and that their many works had 
an enormous circulation. Both wrote, among other 
works, important commentaries on the Fourth 
Gospel ;' both threw the whole weight of their 

5. Gospel History, pp. 600 sq. Evangelium Johamnis, 1827, ed. 7, 


9. Cf. Lecture IV. pp. 192 sq. 1857 ; Eng. Trans. 1836 and 1859 ; 
‘ 'Tholuck, Commentar zum Die Glaubwiirdigkeit der evange- 


LECTURE VI. 919 


influence into the defence of the authenticity, but 
they do not contribute any such substantial addition 
to the facts or the arguments as to demand our special 
attention. It should, however, be noted that their 
exposition of the text and their general position as 
witnesses have a distinct value, derived from their 
quite unusual knowledge of the Semitic languages 
and of the Old Testament. 


Dr. Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer is known to 
all students of the New Testament by his Critical and 
Exegetical Commentary.” The first edition of the por- 
tion on the Fourth Gospel was published as long ago 
as 1834 ; the fifth—and the last during the author’s 
life—in 1869 ; the seventh, edited by Dr. Bernhard 


Weiss, in 1886. Meyer’s study of S. John was, 
therefore, contemporaneous with the influence of 
Strauss and Baur. His last edition contains a 


critical Introduction which fills fifty-five pages of the 
English edition, and ends by giving Ephesus as the 
place, and a.p. 80 as the approximate time. But I 
invite your special attention to the following words 
in which the aged chief of commentators reviews, in 
his own farewell, the negative criticism of the half 
century during which he had himself felt the pulse 
of every movement of New Testament thought and 
knowledge :— 

lischen Geschichte, 1837-38. Heng- * Kritisch - exegetisches Hand- 
stenberg, Das Evangelium des buch: Johannes, ed. 1, 1834; ed. 


heiligen Johannes, 3 vols. 1863, 5, 1869, Eng. Trans. 1874 ; ed. rig 
ed. 2, 1867 ; Eng. Trans. 1865. 1880. 


on 8S. 
John. 


Meyer, 
1800- 
1873. 


Wide 
range of 
work and 
time. 


Review of 
the nega- 
tive 
criticism. 


320 LECTURE VIL 


Such critical labour submits itself to be tried by the 
judgment of scholars, and has its scientific warrant. Nay, 
should it succeed in demonstrating that the declaration of 
the Gospel’s apostolic birth, as written by all the Christian 
centuries, is erroneous, we would have to do honour to the 
truth, which in this case also, though painful at first, could 
not fail to approve itself that which maketh free. There is, 
however, adequate reason to entertain very grave doubts of 
the attainment of this result, and to refuse assent to the 
prognostication of universal victory, which has been too 
hastily associated with these efforts of criticism. Whoever 
is acquainted with the most recent investigations, will, 
indeed, gladly leave to themselves the clumsy attempts to 
establish a parallelism between the Gospel of John and 
ancient fabrications concocted with a special aim, which 
carry their own impress on their face; but he will still be 
unable to avoid the immediate and general duty of con- 
sidering whether those modern investigators who deny that 
it is the work of the apostle have at last discovered a time 
in which — putting aside meanwhile all the substantive 
elements of their proof—the origin of the writing would be 
historically conceivable. For it is a remarkable circum- 
stance in itself, that of the two most recent controversialists, 
who have treated the subject with the greatest scientific 
independence, the one assumes the latest, the other the 
earliest possible, date. If now, with the first, I place its 
composition not sooner than from 150 to 160, I see myself 
driven to the bold assertion of Volkmar,*? who makes the 
evangelist sit at the feet of Justin—a piece of daring which 
lands me in an historical absurdity. If I rightly shrink from 
so preposterous a view, and prefer to follow the thoughtful 
Keim‘ in his more judicious estimate of the ecclesiastical 
testimonies and the relations of the time, then I obtain the 
very beginning of the second century as the period in which 
the work sprang up on the fruitful soil of the church of Asia 


* Cf. Lecture V. pp. 236, 240 sq. * Cf. Lecture V. pp. 258 sqq. 


LECTURE VI. Sal 


Minor, as a plant Johannine indeed in spirit, but post- 
Johannine in origin. But from this position also I feel 
myself at once irresistibly driven. [For I am now brought 
into such immediate contact with the days in which the aged 
apostolic pillar was still amongst the living, and see myself 
transported so entirely into the living presence of his numerous 
Asiatic disciples and admirers, that it cannot but appear to 
me an absolutely insoluble enigma how precisely then and 
there a non-Johannine work—one, moreover, so great and so 
divergent from the older Gospels—could have been issued 
and have passed into circulation under the name of the 
highly honoured apostle. Those disciples and admirers, 
amongst whom he, as the high priest, had worn the πέταλον, 
could not but know whether he had written a Gospel, and if 
so, of what kind; and with the sure tact of sympathy and of 
knowledge, based upon experience, they could not but have 
rejected what was not a genuine legacy from their apostle. 
Keim, indeed, ventures upon the bold attempt of calling 
altogether in question the fact that John had his sphere of 
labour in Asia Minor; but is not this denial, in face of the 
traditions of the church, in fact an impossibility ? It is, and 
must remain so, as long as the truth of historical facts is 
determined by the criterion of historical testimony. Turning, 
then, from Volkmar to Keim, I see before my eyes the fate 
indicated by the old proverb: τὸν καπνὸν φεύγοντα εἰς 
TO πύρ ἐκπίπτειν. 

. . . After all that has been said for and against up to the 
present time, I can have no hesitation in once more express- 
ing my delight in the testimony of Luther—quoted now and 
again with an ironical smile—that ‘ John’s Gospel is the only 
tender, right, chief Gospel, and is to be far preferred before the 
other three, and to be more highly esteemed,’ ὃ 


Dr. Gotthard Victor Lechler, who died last year, 
after filling for thirty years a chair of Theology in 
> Handbuch, ut supra, Eng. Trans., Preface, pp. viii, ix. Cf. Lecture 


V. Ὁ. 246, 
Y 


Delight in 
Luther's 
testimony. 


Lechler, 
1811- 
1889. 


His works. 


Doctrinal 
forms 
prove 
Johannine 
author- 
ship. 


Change of 
view. 


aoe LECTURE VI. 


the University of Leipzig, was, in his student life, a 
pupil of Baur at Tiibingen ; and to this master he was 
probably indebted in large measure for the remark- 
able power of analyzing and tracing forms of thought 
which characterized his works. We have examples of 
this in the History of English Deism, John Wichif and 
the Period before the Reformation, and other important 
books and essays. In 1851 he published a work 
on The Apostolic and post-Apostolic Times, which had 
gained the prize of the Teyler Theological Society 
in Haarlem two years before. A remodelled edition 
appeared in German in 1857, and a third edition 
in 1885, which was published in English in the fol- 
lowing year. The author has maintained through- 
out, in opposition to his teacher Baur, that the forms 
of doctrine contained in the Fourth Gospel with the 
Johannine Epistles and the Apocalypse are consist- 
ent with Apostolic authorship, and admit of no other 
explanation. 

In the third edition the venerable author has in 
effect produced a new work, and in particular has, 
in both the Apostolic and post-Apostolic periods, 
considered the Life before the Doctrine, whereas — 
in the earlier editions, in conformity with the terms 
of the prize, he had considered the Doctrine before 
the Life. In making this fundamental change, he 
says :— 


6 Das apostolische und das nach- Lehre und Leben dargestellt, ed. 
apostolische Zeitalter, mit Riicksicht 1, 1851; ed. 3, 1885; Eng. 
auf Unterschied und Einheit ὧν Trans., 1886. 


LECTURE VI. DOR 


I do so with the conviction that for individuals as well as 
mankind, in the divine education of the human race and in 
sacred history, life and experience are the foundation, while 
consciousness, thought, and teaching form the superstructure. 
Godet says on John 111. 3, with truth and beauty :-— 


‘Une nouvelle vue suppose une nouvelle vie.’ 


In this way I touch upon a fundamental view that uncon- 
sciously dominated the master of the ‘critical school,’ and 
that still seems to prevail among many of its advocates. I 
refer to intellectualism, to which the world of thought and 
knowledge appears as a thing moving’ round itself and con- 
cluded within itself; while the ethical world of action and 
suffering, especially of life that streams from the fountain of 
everlasting life, is to all appearance non-existent and unin- 
telligible.’ ... Apart from such portions as have been worked 
out afresh and fully, all that I give has been subjected to re- 
peated and honest examination. Onall sides the writings and 
treatises relating to the entire subject published in the last 
decades, so far as they were accessible, have been thoroughly 
examined, and many former judgments changed.® 


But his judgment of the Fourth Gospel and the 
Apocalypse has undergone no change :— 


We abide firmly by unity of authorship, and recognize 
both writings as apostolic and Johannine.?® 


Dr. Bernhard Weiss, professor at Berlin, occupies 
a well-recognized position in the first rank of living 
theologians and New Testament critics. His works 
extend over a wide field, but those which deal with our 
present subject would even if they stood alone justify 


7 Das apost. Zeitalter, ut swpra, 8: Toid. p. tx. 
ed. 3; Eng. Trans. pp. vii sq. ° Ibid. vol. ii. p.. 165. 


wi 


Intellec- 
tualism. 


Abides by 
view of 
S. John. 


Weiss, 
1827.- 


His νΟΙΚ5.. 


Johannine 
author- 
ship main- 
tained 
through- 
out. 


Summary 


924 LECTURE VI. 


the author’s high reputation for learning as well as for 
both exact and wide grasp of thought. He published 
a work on the Doctrinal System of John in 1862, and 
has since treated the subject more fully in the 
Biblical Theology of the New Testament, in the Life of 
Jesus, in his editions of Meyer’s Commentary, and in 
the valuable Introduction to the New Testament, the 
second edition of which appeared only last year. 
Throughout this remarkable series of works, the 
Johannine authorship is consistently maintained, and 
they form from their moderation and candour as well 
as from their learning, on both sides of the question, 
one of the strongest presentations of the ancient view 
which has been written in modern times.’ 

Dr. Weiss’s conclusions are summarized in the 
following extract from his latest work :— 


The solution of the Johannine problem must begin at the 
point where Baur instituted his criticisms. It may be pos- 
sible to perceive many departures of the fourth Gospel from 
the older ones, and to apprehend many features peculiar to it 
and much of the material as ideal, explaining them by new 
points of view from which the author set out. But it con- 
tains a fulness of detail of every kind, of supplements to the 
synoptic tradition, of direct contradictions to it and even of 
intended corrections of it, which the ingenuity of criticism 


' Der Johanneische Lehrbegriff, vols., 1883-4, esp. vol. i. pp. 90- 
1862 ; Lehrbuch der biblischen 210; Lehrbuch der EKinleitung in 
Theologie des Neuen Testaments, das Neue Testament, 1886, ed. 2, 
ed. 1, 1868; ed. 4, 1884; Eng. 1889; Eng. Trans., 2vols., 1887-8; 
Trans. 5 vols.,1885, esp. vol. ii.pp. Meyer’s Evangeliwm des Johannes» 
311-416 ; Das Leben Jesu, 2 vols., ed. 6, 1880; ed. 7, 1886. 

1882 ; ed. 2, 1884 ; Eng. Trans., 3 


9 
9 
σι 


LECTURE VI. 


can never trace to the author’s ideal views, but on the con- 
trary present difficulty of union with them. And it is un- 
questionable, that the author, who only made the reception 
of his work difficult through these departures from the 
tradition that prevailed in the Church, was limited by 
definite recollections or traditions which would no longer 
have existed in the second century. Besides, all assumption 
of ideal inventions is inconsistent with the weight which the 
Gospel lays upon the actuality of what it narrates, as Beyschlag 
in particular has convincingly proved; and it can be well 


shown that the speeches of Christ in the Gospel are absolutely ἡ 


unintelligible as mere expositions of the theology of logos- 
philosophers. But criticism has not succeeded in fixing the 
date of the Gospel viewed as a pseudonymous production. 
Apart from the fact that it is much unsettled respecting this 
point, the post-Apostolic time of the second century presents 
no person, nor even any definite tendency of thought from 
which a work of such spiritual significance as criticism itself 
allows the Gospel to be, could have emanated. The work 
cannot be either the cause or the product of a reconciliation 


of contending opposites in the second century, since such re- 
conciliation did not take place ; on the contrary, the struggle 


between ecclesiastical consciousness and gnosis only became 
sharper after Judaism had been overcome. And yet both 
parties frequently appealed to this very Gospel with like zeal ; 
the gnostics first, so that the Church had every reason for 
disavowing a pseudonymous production so suspicious. ‘The 
greatest riddle is always the pseudonymity itself. It is in- 
conceivable that the unknown could connect his writing 
directly with the Apocalypse which, according to the concep- 
tion of its relation to the Gospel set forth by criticism itself, 
and in spite of all that has been said about a certain affinity 
of the two works, is still thoroughly adverse to the Gospel. 
So also is the way inconceivable in which the writer claims 
for himself identity with the Apostle John, though this is 
only indirectly or slightly intimated; a procedure opposed to 
that of all pseudonymous writing; as is the fact that he 


of his 
conclu- 
sions 


— 


Luthardt, 
1823- 


His works 
devoted to 
the Johan- 
nine ques- 
tion. 


326 LECTURE VI. 


directly vouches for his own ocular testimony, which can only 
be pronounced a plain deception.? 


Dr. Christoph Ernst Luthardt, formerly professor 
at Marburg, 1854-56, and since 1856 at Leipzig, 
has exercised a great influence as a prominent leader 
in the Lutheran church, an eloquent preacher and 
lecturer, a literary editor,’ as well as an author. His 
more critical studies have been chiefly devoted to the 
Johannine question,’ and these works extending over 
a period of more than thirty years, have become widely 
known to all students of the subject in their English 
It will be sufficient 
for our present purpose of estimating modern criticism 


as well as in their German form. 


on this question, to quote the following paragraphs 
from S. John the Author of the Fourth Gospel, a work 
which owes no small part of its value to the careful 
editing and references of an American scholar, Dr. 
Caspar Gregory :— 

We can now sum up the results of our inquiries as to the 
external attestation of the fourth gospel. We see that as 
soon as traces of the gospel meet us, it is testified to, both 


inside and outside of the Church, as a work of John’s, and asa 
book of unquestionable apostolic authority. But these traces 


2 Weiss, Manual of Introduction 
to the New Testament, Eng. Trans. 
1887-8, vol. ii. pp. 399, 400. 

3 Theologische Literaturblatt, 
Ewangelisch - wtherische Kirchen- 
zeitung, and Zeitschrift fiir kirch- 
liche Wissenschaft‘wnd Leben. 

* De Compositione Evangelit 
Joannei, 1852 ; Das Johanneische 


Evangelium, 1852-3, 2 vols.; ed. 
2, 1875-6; Eng. Trans., 1878, 3 
vols. ; Der Johanneische Ursprung 
des vierten Evangeliums, 1874; 
Eng. Trans., with valuable biblio- 
graphical appendix by Gregory, 
1875 ; Evangelium nach Johannes 
in Strack und Zéckler’s Kurzge- 
fasster Kommentar, 1886. 


LECTURE VI. 597 


and this testimony go beyond the middle of the second 
century, and drive us back to the beginning of it. Now it 
is fixed that the apostle John lived at Ephesus, and that till 
late, to Trajan’s time. And it is just there that we have to 
seek for the home of John’s gospel. But the nearer to the 
time of John we are forced to go back with this book, the 
more impossible it is that the recollections of the apostle, 
which were still so fresh and general, would have so generally, 
and without opposition, let such a book as the gospel is be 
pressed on them if it had not been apostolic, and above all, 
if it had been so foreign to John’s sphere of thought and to 
his leanings as men say it 15. 

Therefore the external testimony attests the Johannean 
composition. The character of the book itself must needs 
make this supposition impossible if we are not to believe this 
testimony. In that case there would be nothing left for us 
but to let this book stand asan insoluble problem. The ques- 
tion is, whether or not the character of the book itself forbids 
its composition by John. 


We may close these inquiries, then, with this result: That, 
choosing the most moderate expression, nothing has come in 
our way that disproved the tradition as to the Johannean 


Result. 


origin of the gospel, but much that served to confirm it. | 


The decision of the Tiibingen criticism and its successors, 
with which the acts of this critical process were declared to 
be closed, was far from corresponding with the real contents 
of the subject, and from being ratified by the facts. In it 
one must make up his mind to take the Johannean question 
not as a historical but as a psychological question. His- 
torically, the matter is as clear and decided as the case can be 
in such historical and critical inquiries. The question only 
concerns the psychological possibility. But we have seen 
that this question is not so insoluble as to be able to make a 
point for appeal against the historical evidence.° 


5 Der Johanneische Ursprung, Eng. Trans. 1875, pp. 162-3 and 278-9, 


Godet, 
1812- 


Convic- 
tion by 
impres- 
sion, 


and by 
scientific 
study. 


328 LECTURE VI. 


Dr. Frédéric Godet, professor at Neuchatel, the 
pupil of Neander, and the tutor of the late Emperor 
of Germany from 1838 to 1844, published the first 
edition of his Commentary on the Gospel of S. John in 
1863-65. The second edition, completely recast, 
appeared in 1876-77, and a third edition, in which 
the work is again brought thoroughly up to date, 
in 1881-85.° It has been translated into English 
on both sides of the Atlantic,’ German—in which 
form it has passed through several editions— 
Dutch, and Danish. Perhaps no Commentary on S. 
John has entered so fully into the spirit of the text ; 
and the author’s fine intuitive power is accompanied 
by a broad and vigorous intellectual grasp, which is 
specially felt all through the Critical Introduction in 
the first volume.’ The result of his studies is best 
expressed in his own words :— 


The result of this renewed study has been a yet firmer 
scientific conviction of the authenticity of the writing which 
the Church has transmitted to us under the name of John. 
There is another kind of conviction which arises in the heart 
from simply reading such a book. ‘This conviction does not 
increase, it is spontaneous and hence complete from the first 
moment. It resembles that confiding love at first sight, that 
full and final impression to which thirty years of mutual life 
and devotion can add nothing. 

Scientific study cannot form such a tie: what it can do, is 
only to ward off the hostile attacks which would threaten to 


6 Commentaire sur 1 Lvangile de  pletement revue,’ 1881-85. 
Saint Jean, 1868-65, 2 vols. ; 71877, and from ed. 3, New 
ed. 2, ‘complétement refondu,’ York, 1886. 
1876-77, 3 vols.; ed. 3, ‘com- 8 Ed. 3, pp. 1-376. 


29 


Od 


LECTURE VI. 


loosen or sever it. I can truly say I have never felt this 
scientific certainty so fully confirmed, as after this fresh exa- 
mination of the proofs on which it rests, and of the arguments 
recently advanced against it.° 


Dr. Willibald Beyschlag has been since 1860 
Professor of Theology in the University of Halle, and 
is an acknowledged leader of the liberal-evangelical 
party.’ 
On the Johannine Question,’ and a recent important 
work on the Life of Jesus. During his Jong public 
career Dr. Beyschlag has consistently maintained 
with freedom of thought and wide critical knowledge 
the full Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. 


Among his numerous writings is a volume 


Soon after the publication of his German work 
on the question, he wrote two remarkable articles 


on The Gospel of John and Modern Criticism in an 


° * Le résultat de cette étude re- 
nouvelée a été chez moi la convic- 
tion scientifique toujours plus 
ferme de Vauthenticité de l’écrit 
que lEglise nous a transmis sous 
le nom de Jean. 1] y a une con- 
viction d’une autre nature qui se 
forme dans le cceur ἃ la simple 
lecture d’un pareil livre. Cette 
conviction ne s’accroit pas; elle 
est immédiate, par conséquent 
compléte dés le premier instant. 
Elle ressemble & la confiance et & 
amour du premier regard, ἃ cette 
impression décisive ἃ lintégrité de 
laquelle trente années de vie com- 
mune et de mutuel dévouement 
n’ajoutent rien. 

‘L’étude scientifique ne saurait 
former un semblable lien: ce 


qu’elle peut faire, c’est unique- 
ment d’écarter les pressions hos- 
tiles qui menaceraient de le re- 
lacher ou de le briser. Eh bien, 
je puis dire que jamais je n’ai 
senti cette assurance scientifique 
aussi affermie qu’aprés ce nouvel 
examen des preuves sur lesquelles 
elle repose et des raisons récem- 
ment alléguées contre elle.’ Com- 
mentaire, ut supra, ed. 3, tom. 1. 
pp. vi and vii. 

' The Mittelpartei, represented 
by the Deutsche Evangelische 
Blitter, of which he has been 
editor since 1876. 

* Zur Johanneischen 
1876. 

5. Das Leben Jesu, 2 vols. 1885 


Frage, 


Bey- 
schlag, 
1823- 


Examina- 
tion of 
Baur’s 
theory. 


Result. 


Zahn, 
1838- 


330 LECTURE VI. 


English Review,’ which are mainly an examination of 
Baur’s theory as compared with the internal evidences 
furnished by the Gospel itself. This is the result at 


which he arrives :— 


Lastly, it is inconceivable that the Gospel should have 
been composed in the second century. Not to speak of the 
great character which is in it, which far exceeds anything 
that the second Christian century has produced, and which 
would have left behind no trace and no memory of itself, by 
name, apart from these writings, the spirit of the century 
does not harmonize with that of the book. That spirit had 
already become traditional and ascetic, and it was no longer 
one that would be stirred by purely religious questions but 
by strongly theological and ecclesiastical ones. And by them 
this remarkable book is entirely untinged, yea, it is alto- 
gether of another cast. It is an historical monstrosity which 
the anti-Johannine criticism proposes for our acceptance. 
But we are compelled to say, on the contrary, that only a 
previous knowledge of the personality speaking in the Gospel, 
only the notorious authority of the eye-witness and apostle, 
from the first moment appealing on behalf of the book, could 
have opened the way for the acceptance and recognition of a 
Gospel, departing so much from all tradition, and that in an 
age so careful of tradition, and already in possession of the 
Synoptists.* 


Among the later German writers on this subject, 
I will ask your permission to take the evidence of 
two. 

One of these is Dr. Theodore Zahn, who is eminent 
as a writer on many subjects connected with the 
early history and literature of the Church. He was 


4 Contemporary Review, Oct. and Noy. 187 i 
5. Ibid., loc. cit. Ὁ. 948. 


LECTURE VI. Bou 


formerly privat-docent at Gottingen and professor at 
Kiel and Erlangen, and has lately succeeded to the 
chair at Leipzig vacated by the death of Dr. Lechler. 
The eminence and learning of Dr. Zahn are placed 
beyond all question, even by those who differ most 
from some of his conclusions. Were evidence needed, 
the edition of the Hpzstles of Ignatius and Polycarp,$ 
and the Investigations for a History of the New Testa- 
ment Canon and the Ancient Church Literature,’ which 
have appeared at intervals during the last ten years, 
would more than supply it. And with eminence and 
learning, there is an individuality and independence 
which refuses to call any man master, or to think 
any opinion unquestionable. At length the History 


of the New Testament Canon,® for which so much ἃ 


preparatory work had been done, has begun to 
appear. The first volume is now in our hands, and 
two more are to follow. We have already the history 
down to Origen; and though some portions of the 
arguments await further development in certain pro- 
mised Hacursuses, we have enough to show that all 
the weight of Professor Zahn’s general erudition and 
minute knowledge of the history of the second cen- 
tury, is to be thrown without any hesitation into the 
scale in favour of the full Johannine authorship 
of the Fourth Gospel and its acceptance from the 


δ Patrum Apostolicorum Opera: Neutestamentlichen Kanonsundder 
Von Gebhardt, Harnack, Zahn,  altkirchlichen Literatur, 1881, etc. 
1876, fase. 11. 8 Geschichte des Neutestament- 

1 Forschungen zur Geschichte des lichen Kanons, Bd. i. 1888-9. 


His inde- 
pendence. 


The His- 
tory of the 
anon. 


The 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


Franke, 
1853- 


The Old 
Testament 
in John. 


Scope of 
work. 


ee LECTURE VI. 


first. Here, as elsewhere, Dr. Zahn, with character- 
istic freedom, puts forth some opinions which are 
peculiar to himself, and will probably remain so ; but 
on the subject of our present inquiry there is in his 
view no room for question. 


The other German scholar to whose evidence 1 
invite special attention is a young and, in this 
country, comparatively unknown writer, Dr. August 
Hermann Franke, formerly a privat-docent at Halle, 
and director of Tholuck’s clergy school, but since 
the publication, in 1885, of the work to which I am 
about to refer, Professor of Theology at Kiel. This 
work is entitled The Old Testament in John,’ and, in 
addition to being a strong vindication of the Johan- 
nine authorship of the Fourth Gospel, is specially 
important in that it approaches the study of the 
Gospel in the right way, always remembering what 
the commentators on Ὁ. John have but too con- 
stantly forgotten, that the Divine subject and the 
human author were alike Hebrew, both in speech and 
the circumstances of life, and that the roots of the 
thought and language must alike be found in the Old 
Testament. 

Professor Franke commences with the inquiry, 
What is the attitude of the Gospel to the Old Cove- 
nant, its people, its revelation, its writings ? 

The second and chief part of the work deals with 


® Das alte Testament bei Jo- und Beurtheilung der Johanneischen 
hanes, ein Beitrag zur Erkliirung Schriften. Géttingen, 1885. 


LECTURE VI. 300 


the Old Testament foundation of the doctrinal con- 
ceptions in the Gospel. In some points this is the 
common Old Testament groundwork which underlies 
all New Testament doctrine, including the Fourth 
Gospel. This is illustrated by the doctrines taught 
concerning God, the world, eschatology, the Messiah. 
But there is also a specific Johannine type of doctrine, 
and the essential argument of the book is that the 
Old Testament lies necessarily at the root of this 
doctrinal individuality. The proofs are based upon 
an examination of the following doctrines :—Salva- 
tion in Christ as the fulfilment of that given in the 
Old Testament ; the manifestation of God in Jesus 
Christ ; the covenant sacrifice and the atonement ; 
the new commandment ; eternal life through com- 
munion with God ; the new society. 

The third division of the work treats of the Old 
Testament as the basis of the external form of the 
Johannine writings. The inquiry is here made as to 
the Johannine use of the words of the Old Testament, 
the use of the original text and the Septuagint, and 
the point of view from which John interpreted the 
Old Testament. 

The result of this careful and minute examination 
goes far to prove—even when we have drawn the pen 
through some more or less fanciful conjectures!'—that 
the author of the Fourth Gospel must necessarily have 
been a Hebrew-speaking Jew of the first century, and 


* Cf. esp. review by Riehm in Studien und Kritiken, 1885, pp. 
563-582. 


Johannine 
type of 
doctrine. 


Form of 
he 
writing. 


Theauthor 
a Hebrew- 
speaking 
Jew of the 
first 
century. 


Other 
writers. 


334 LECTURE VI. 
in this proof Professor Franke makes a substantial 
addition to the evidence in favour of the authenticity. 


Space would fail me for even a brief enumeration 
of other modern writers who have been convinced that, 
the Fourth Gospel is really the work of the Apostle 
whose name it bears, and have felt constrained to 
offer their evidence in its favour; but the following 
names, at least, must be added: Olshausen, the 
Biblical commentator ;? the brilliant and able, 
though erratic, Thiersch ;* Baumgarten-Crusius, the 
Jena Professor of Theology ;* Andrews Norton, the 
American Unitarian divine : ὃ our own Greek Testa- 
ment commentators Alford® and Wordsworth 7 
Bishop Alexander,® the rock of whose scholarship 
is none the less solid for being clothed with forms 
of poetic beauty ; Frederick Denison Maurice,’ ex- 
pounder of S. John in life and word ; Astié,’ the 


2 Die Aechtheit der wer cano- 
nischen Evangelien, 1823 ; Nach- 
weis der Echtheit des Newen Testa- 
ments, 1832 ; Biblische Commentar, 
edited after author’s death by 
Ebrard and Wiesinger, 1837-62 ; 
Commentary on the Gospels, Clark’s 
Library, 1846. 

3 Versuch zur Herstellung des 
hist. Standpunkts fiir die Kritik 
der N. T. Schriften, 1845 ; Hinige 
Worte iiber die Aechtheit der N. T. * 
Schriften, 1846; Die Kirche in 
apost. Zeitalter wu. die Entstehung 
der N. T. Schriften, 1852. 

* Theologische Auslegung der Jo- 


hanneischen Schriften, 1848. Part 
11. 1845. Posthumous. 

> Genuineness of the Gospels, 
1837-44 ; ed. 2, 1846: see esp. 
evidence of Justin and the early 
Heretics. Cf. Lecture II. p. 68. 

® Greek Testament, 1849-61. 

7 Greek Testament, 1856-60, 
1872. 

ὃ Commentary on Epistles of S. 
John, 1881, ed. Canon Cook ; and 
Epistles of S. John in the Ex- 
positor’s Bible, 1889. 

® Gospel of St. John, 1857. 

τ Explication de V Evangile selon 
Saint Jean, 1863-4. 


LECTURE VI. 9.9.9 


Professor at Lausanne; Tischendorf,? known as ἃ 
textual critic to us all ; Thenius,® to whom it was the 
Gospel of Gospels ; Fisher,’ Professor at Yale College ; 
Uhlhorn,’ in various essays, especially the series on 
Modern Presentation of the Lives of Jesus; Riggen- 
bach,° who answers Volkmar, and Van Oosterzee,’ 
who answers Scholten ; De Pressensé* in many works, 
especially the Jésus Christ; Richard Holt Hutton,® 
author of the ablest essay on Baur in the English, 
perhaps in any language ; Schaff,' especially in the 
edition of Lange’s Commentary, and the History of 
the Church; Milligan,? Professor at Aberdeen, in 
separate essays and in the Commentary, where he had 
the great advantage of Moulton® for a co-worker ; 
Liddon* and Leathes® and Wace,° our Bampton 
Lecturers ; McLellan,’ whose learned work is un- 


* Lange's Commentary, 1872, 
new edition, 1886; and History of 
tne Christian Church, New York, 


2 Wann wurden unsere Evange- 
lien verfasst ? 1865-6. 
5. Das Evangelium der Evange- 


lien, 1865. 

* Essays on Supernatural Origin 
of Christianity, 1866 ; Article in 
American edition of Smith’s Dic- 
tionary of the Bible, 1868 ; Grounds 
of Theistic and Christian Belief, 
1885. 

5 Vortriige ... 
1866. 

& Die Zeuanisse, 1866. 

7 Das Johannes - Evangelium, 
1867 ; Eng. Trans. 1869. 

8 Jésus-Christ, son temps, sa vie, 
son cewvre, 1866. 

9. Theological Essays, 1871, ed. 
3, 1888. 


Lebens Jesu, 


1858, ed. 3, 1886, &ec. 

2 Contemporary Review, 1867 - 
68-71 ; Journal of Sacred Litera- 
ture, 1867. 

* Popular Commentary on S. 
John’s Gospel, 1879. 

* The Divinity of our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ, 1866, ed. 13, 
1889. 

° Witness of St. John to Christ, 
1870 ; Religion of the Christ, 
1874. 

° The Gospel and its Witnesses, 
1883. 

7 Four Gospels, 1875. 


Value of 
their 
testimony. 


336 LECTURE VI. 


happily but a fragment ; Lias* and Murphy,’ whose 
works on the doctrinal system furnish evidence of 
high value ; Ezra Abbot,’ whose name has occurred 
to us already ; Charteris,’ Professor at Edinburgh, 
and author of a singularly modest and able work on 
Canonicity ; Plummer,®? my own colleague at Dur- 
ham ; Schanz,* Professor at Tiibingen, and one of the 
ablest modern commentators of the Roman church ; 
Reynolds,’ President of Cheshunt College, who has 
lately contributed an original investigation of striking 
cogency and freshness ; and the Abbé Fillion,® whose 
recent work on the Bible contains a valuable Intro- 
duction to the Gospels, and especially to the Gospel 
according to ὃ. John. 


This is not merely a list of names : it represents 
a body of men, differing in nationality, language, 
church, and creed, but, without an exception, able 
and careful scholars, who have thought out the pro- 
blem for themselves. We may not accept all their 
statements, but their convictions have been formed 
side by side with, and in full consideration of, the 
negative criticism of the Gospel ; and their combined 
witness is at once in the strongest degree condemna- 


8 Doctrinal System of St. John, * Commentar, 1885. 

1875. > Pulpit Commentary : ὃ. John, 
® Scientific Basis of Faith, 1873. Introduction, 1888. 
1 External Evidences, 1880. ® Introduction générale aux 
2 Canonicity, 1880. Evangiles ; Sainte Bible, avec Com- 


5 Greek Testament: St. John, mentaires, 1889. 
1882. 


LECTURE VI. Bus 


tory of this criticism, and in the strongest degree 
confirmatory of the Johannine authorship. 


Four names are absent from the above list which 
will occur to all English-speaking students as repre- 
senting the most trustworthy body of opinion on this 
subject. I have reserved them for somewhat fuller 
notice, because I venture to submit that the opinions 
of Bishop Lightfoot, Bishop Westcott, Dr. Salmon, and 
Dr. Sanday form in combination a weight of evidence 
upon this subject which not only overbalances any 
similar combination, but is in itself absolutely unique. 

I will first ask you to think for a few moments of 
the witnesses and then of their evidence. 

Of Bishop Lightfoot’s special qualifications to 
pronounce an opinion, a careful estimate was pub- 
lished three or four years ago by one of the few men 
who is thoroughly able to judge :— 


What, it may be asked, are the particular qualities which 
have won for Bishop Lightfoot so pre-eminent a place, by 
the universal consent of all competent judges both in England 
and on the Continent? It is necessary here to weigh our 
words ; for though the impression which Bishop Lightfoot 
has left upon the public mind is a very distinct one, yet 
when a comparison is suggested with other illustrious names, 
it is not enough to use general phrases, and it becomes im- 
portant to single out special points which are most character- 
istic and distinctive. I should be disposed to say, then, that 
the place which Bishop Lightfoot holds was due not only to 
his possession, but to his very remarkable balance and com- 
bination, of a number of distinct excellences—exactness of 
scholarship, width of erudition, scientific method, sobriety of 


Z 


Four 
English 
names 
reserved 
for special 
treatment. 


Character 
of the 
witnesses : 


Bishop 
Light- 
foot, 
1828-89. 


Bishop 
Westcott. 


338 | LECTURE VI. 


judgment, lucidity of style.?.. . All through his writings 
we feel that we have before us the Senior Classic, who 
was at home in Thucydides and Plato before he was at 
home in St. Paul; he had shown his skill in many a piece of 
finished classical composition before he undertook to repro- 
duce the Greek of Polycarp where the Latin only was extant ; 
and it was his practised hand and trained sensitiveness to 
Greek idiom that made itself felt in his felicitous emenda- 
tions of Clement and Ignatius. It is here that the Cambridge 
scholar has the advantage over his German competitors. . . . In 
reference to exegesis. and criticism, I doubt if it is any 
exaggeration to say that up to the date* of his transference 
to Durham, not a monograph of any importance in England, 
France, Italy, or Germany seems to have escaped him... . 
His critics may hold different opinions themselves (based 
very probably in large part upon the materials which Bishop 
Lightfoot has given them), but I do not remember to have 
seen or heard of an instance in which he was convicted of 
what we should call a mistake. . . . We have only to think 
of the range of his published works to realise what this 
means.? Other writers have had a scientific method, and yet 
they do not command the same degree of confidence. It is 
impossible altogether to eliminate the individual element in 
critical decisions, and the peculiar reliance which is placed 
in those of Dr. Lightfoot is due to the sense that they have 
been most carefully and judicially weighed. . . . He never 
takes up an idea hastily; and if he is slow to give his 
thoughts expression, they come with all the more weight of 
maturity when they are expressed.' 


Of the scholarship, the knowledge, the thought, 
the delicate powers of perception and intuition which 


7 Dr. Sanday in the Hxpositor, 9 Dr. Sanday, wt supra, pp. 18, 
July 1886, pp. 19, 14. 19, 20. 

8 There was no occasion to fix 1 Ibid. pp. 21, 22. 
this limit. 


LECTURE VL 339 


the present Bishop of Durham has devoted for half a 
century to the New Testament writings—-their con- 
tents, their text, and their history—and above all to 
the writings of 5. John, it is unnecessary to remind 
an English student. Many scholars and thinkers felt 
what one of their number said, when the Commentary 
on the Fourth Gospel was published :-— 


To appreciate in any degree the merit of Professor West- 
cott’s work—the fullest, the most finished, the most entirely 
decisive of its kind, we incline to think, in the whole compass 
of English theological literature—it is necessary to see what 
the most advanced position of sceptical criticism actually is, 
that it may be perceived how quietly and completely it is 
pulverised by this great master.? 


Of the special value of Dr. Salmon’s judgment, 
like testimony from a like competent authority is at 
hand :— 


Dr. Salmon’s ‘ Historical Introduction to the New Testa- 
ment’ is one of those remarkable books which can only be pro- 
duced at rare intervals, and of which the importance depends on 
a singular combination in their subject-matter, their author- 
ship, and the circumstances in which they appear. . . . The 
name of Dr. Salmon is of Huropean reputation, and the 
weight it carries is all the greater, because this reputa- 
tion was originally gained in another field of labour. Dr. 
Salmon’s works have, for many years, been the standard 
treatises for advanced students in some of the highest 
branches of modern mathematical science. They still hold 
their ground, notwithstanding the great progress which has 
been made in the abstruse subjects of which some of them 
treat. They have been translated into two or three of the 
Continental languages, and the eminence they have won was 


* Church Quarterly Review, Jan. 1880, p. 329. 
Z2 


Dr. 
Salmon. 


340 LECTURE VI. 


marked, not long ago, by the election of their author to the 
rare distinction of a Member of the French Institute.* .. . 
Considering the prevalent superstitious worship of science 
and its high priests, it must add to the attention a man can 
command if he is one of the initiated in this mystery. Dr. 
Salmon speaks with full authority in this respect, and he is 
one of the most eminent of the many examples around us, 
including the present President of the Royal Society, that 
profound scientific knowledge is fully compatible with a 
devout faith in the Creed of Christianity. . . . It will be 
seen, that the real truth is, that the inveterate prejudice is on 
the part of the chief opponents of Christian tradition. But 
it is none the less valuable that the truth should be main- 
tained, as in this volume, in a spirit which must impress 
every fair reader with the scientific calmness of the writer's 
spirit and method. ‘ Although,’ says the author in his Pre- 
face, ‘my work may be described as apologetic in the sense 
that its results agree in the main with the traditional belief 
of the Church, I can honestly say that I have not worked in 
the spirit of an advocate anxious to defend a foregone conclu- 
sion. I have aimed at making my investigations historical, and 
at asserting nothing but what the evidence, candidly weighed, 
seemed to warrant.’ The tone, no less than the method, of 
Dr. Salmon’s argument fully sustains this claim, and engages, 
from the outset, the reader’s confidence. One feels oneself in 
the hands of a quiet and masterly guide, who is only con- 
cerned to point out to us the facts with which we have to 
deal, and who will not press a single conclusion merely 
because it conforms to his own inclination or presump- 
tions. . . . In discussing any question of criticism, Dr. 
Salmon writes in just the same manner as if he were investi- 
gating a problem in conic sections or the higher algebra.* 


8 Since these words were writ- Copley Medal of the Royal Society 
ten, the high academical distinc- (1889) have been conferred on 
tion of the Provostship of Trinity Dr. Salmon. 

College, Dublin (1888), and the * Quarterly Review, Oct. 1886, 
high scientific distinction of the pp. 460-463. 


LECTURE VI. 341 


Our own Professor of Exegesis has been fewer 
years before the world than any one of the three with 
whom he is here grouped ; but if a like number of 
years 1s given him for his work, a future generation 
of scholars will probably think him not the least 
competent of the group to express an authoritative 
judgment on the present question. It was to the 
Johannine problem that Dr. Sanday devoted his first 
published work ; and it is this problem which has 
occupied much of his later studies. He has the 
pecuhar fitness for it which comes from the addition 
to sound scholarship and an untiring power of taking 
pains, of a delicately balanced judgment which appre- 
ciates the weight of every objection and sympathizes 
with the feeling of every difficulty. The reader of 
Dr. Sanday’s writings may sometimes think that he 
carries this sensitiveness to modern objections too 
far; and that he is too ready to invert the legal 
maxim and to give the accuser the benefit of the 
doubt ; but the balanced mind which estimates even 
the trifling weight of a passing theory is never 
unaffected by the solid weight of historic fact, and the 
final judgment is definite and clear. 

It is the more necessary to invite attention to the 
really remarkable position of these English divines, 
because, on the one hand, some continental writers 
seem to live in unhappy ignorance of them ; and, on 
the other hand, many English students, taking omne 
agnotum pro magnifico, seem to think it necessary to 
their reputation as scholars, to give ready credence to 


Dr. 
Sanday. 


Their 
position 
unnoticed 
by Bleek, 


Weiss, 


Meyer. 


342 LECTURE VI. 


the last essay which has appeared in a Zeitschrift, or, 
as German is now more commonly known, to the last 
thesis which has been printed at a Dutch university. 
They import rushlights from abroad, apparently un- 
aware that they have sunlight at home. 

It is very much to the loss of German science, and 
it is in itself almost incredible, for example, that in a 
book so full and able, and in most respects thoroughly 
up to date, as the last edition of Bleek’s Introduction® by 
Mangold—a work extending to more than a thousand 
closely-printed pages—there is hardly a reference to 
any writer of this group. Ephesians, Colossians, Phi- 
lippians and the Ignatian question are dealt with in 
1886 without a reference to Bishop Lightfoot ; and 
the writings of 5. John, and the Canon of the New 
Testament, without a reference to Dr. Westcott ! 

Weiss’s Introduction is later still. I have already 
referred to its excellence. In the preface, printed in 
English in 1887, the author says :— 


Of actual fellow-workers on the problems of the New 
Testament I hope I have forgotten none. But I have not 
been able to follow up foreign literature to any extent.® 


There is no trace of any acquaintance with a single 
English writer. Nor is this serious omission amended 
in the German edition of last year. 

Meyer’s Commentary on the Gospel of S. John® has 
passed through seven German editions, of which the 


" Cf. supra, p. 314. δ Cf. supra, pp. 324 sq. 
Τ᾽ Cf. supra, pp. 319 sq. 


LECTURE VIL. 343 


last was issued by Dr. Weiss in 1886. Heis apparently 
quite unaware that Dr. Westcott had published his 
great work seven years before—though he has ‘ natu- 
rally ’ referred to the modern English editions of the 
text—and he explains that he makes no use of the 


third edition of Godet’s Commentary, because it had 


not yet been translated from French into German.?® 


But in England at least we know what value to 
attach to the evidence of these witnesses. I will de- 
tain you but a few moments by reference to it. 

And first, the evidence of Bishop Lightfoot. I 
have already quoted his final opinion, based upon the 
internal evidences of the Fourth Gospel.? This is 
his view of the external evidences written in 1876, 
and republished last year :— 


We have now reached the close of the second century, 
and it is not necessary to pursue the history of the School of 
St. John in their Asiatic home beyond this point. . . . Out of 
a very extensive literature, by which this school was once 
represented, the extant remains are miserably few and frag- 
mentary; but the evidence yielded by these meagre relics is 
decidedly greater, in proportion to their extent, than we had 
any right to expect. As regards the Fourth Gospel, this is 
especially the case. Ifthe same amount of written matter— 
occupying a very few pages in all—were extracted accident- 
ally from the current theological literature of our own day, the 
chances, unless 1 am mistaken, would be strongly against our 
finding so many indications of the use of this Gospel. In every 
one of the writers, from Polycarp and Papias to Polycrates, 
we have observed phenomena which bear witness directly or 


8 Op. cit. 2te Hilfte, p. viii. ® Cf. Lecture IIT. p. 165. 


Their 
evidence : 


Bishop 
Light- 
foot’s: 


Theschool 
of S. John 
in second 
century. 


344 LECTURE VI. 


indirectly, and with different degrees of distinctness, to its 
recognition. It is quite possible for critical ingenuity to find 
a reason for discrediting each instance in turn. An objector 
may urge in one case, that the writing itself is a forgery ; in 
a second, that the particular passage is an interpolation ; in a 
third, that the supposed quotation is the original and the 
language of the Evangelist the copy; in a fourth, that the in- 
cident or saying was not deduced from this Gospel but from 
some apocryphal work, containing a parallel narrative. By a 
sufficient number of assumptions, which lie beyond the range 
of verification, the evidence may be set aside. But the early 
existence and recognition of the Fourth Gospel is the one 
simple postulate which explains all the facts. The law of 
gravitation accounts for the various phenomena of motion, the 
falling of a stone, the jet of a fountain, the orbits of the 
planets, and so forth. It is quite possible for any one, who 
is so disposed, to reject this explanation of nature. Provided 
that he is allowed to postulate a new force for every new fact 
with which he is confronted, he has nothing to fear. He will 


then 
‘gird the sphere 
With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, 
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb,’ 


happy in his immunity. But the other theory will prevail 
nevertheless by reason of its simplicity.! 


Again :— 

Irenzeus is the first extant writer in whom, from the 
nature of his work, we have a right to expect explicit infor- 
mation on the subject of the Canon. Earlier writings, which 
have been preserved entire, are either epistolary, like the let- 
ters of the Apostolic Fathers, where any references to the 
Canonical books must necessarily be precarious and incidental 
(to say nothing of the continuance of the oral tradition at this 


" Contemporary Review, xxvii. pp. 495-6 ; Essays on Supernatural 
Religion, 1889, pp. 249 sq. 


LECTURE VI. 345 


early date as a disturbing element); or devotional, like the 
Shepherd of Hermas, which is equally devoid of quotations 
from the Old Testament and from the New; or historical, like 
the account of the martyrdoms at Vienne and Lyons, where 
any such allusion is gratuitous ; or apologetic, like the great 
mass of the extant Christian writings of the second century, 
where the reserve of the writer naturally leads him to be silent 
about authorities which would carry no weight with the Jewish 
or heathen writers whom he addressed. But the work of 
Irenzeus is the first controversial treatise addressed to Chris- 
tians on questions of Christian doctrine, where the appeal lies 
to Christian documents. And here the testimony to our four 
Gospels is full and clear and precise.’ 


This is the definite witness of Bishop Westcott :— 


As far, therefore, as indirect internal evidence is con- 
cerned, the conclusion towards which all the lines of inquiry 
converge remains unshaken, that the fourth Gospel was 
written by a Palestinian Jew, by an eye-witness, by the 
disciple whom Jesus loved, by John the son of Zebedee.? 


Again :— 

Three passages (John i. 14; xix. 35; xxi. 24) appear to 
point directly to the position and person of the author. . . 
The general result of the examination of these passages is 
thus tolerably distinct. The Fourth Gospel claims to be 
written by an eye-witness, and this claim is attested by those 
who put the work in circulation.‘ 


Again :— 


In considering the external evidence for the author- 


Bishop 
West- 
cott’s: 
Internal 
evidence. 


External 


ship of the Fourth Gospel, it is necessary to bear in mind evidence. 


2 Contemporary Review xxviii. 3. The Gospel according to St. 
pp. 419, 420; Essays, ut supra, John, ed. of 1886, p. xxv. 
p. 271. * Ibid. pp. xxv and xxviii. 


All evi- 
dence 
points in 
one direc- 
tion. 


Dr. 
Salmon’s: 


Gospel 
and 


346 LECTURE VI. 


the conditions under which it must be sought. It is 
agreed on all hands that the Gospel was written at a late 
date, towards the close of the first century, when the 
Evangelic tradition, preserved in complementary forms in the 
Synoptic Gospels, had gained general currency, and from its 
wide spread had practically determined the popular view of 
the life and teaching of the Lord. And further, the substance 
of the record deals with problems which belong to the life of 
the Church and to a more fully developed faith. On both 
grounds references to the contents of this Gospel would 
naturally be rarer in ordinary literature than references to the 
contents of the other Gospels. Express citations are made 
from all about the same time.’ 


Again :— 


In reviewing these traces of the use of the Gospel in 
the first three quarters of a century after it was written, 
we readily admit that they are less distinct and numerous 
than those might have expected who are unacquainted with 
the character of the literary remains of the period. But it 
will be observed that all the evidence points in one direction. 
There is not, with one questionable exception, any positive 
indication that doubt was anywhere thrown upon the authen- 
ticity of the book. It is possible to explain away in detail 
this piece of evidence and that, but the acceptance of the 
book as the work of the Apostle adequately explains all the 
phenomena without any violence; and hitherto all the new 
evidence which has come to light has supported this universal 
belief of the Christian Society, while it has seriously modified 
the rival theories which have been set up against it.® 


The evidence of Dr. Salmon is not less remark- 
able :— 


I do not think it necessary to spend much time on 
the proofs that the first Epistle and the Gospel are the work 


° The Gospel, ut supra, p. XXviil. 6 Tbid, p. xxxii. 


LECTURE VI. 347 


of the same writer. . . . It would be waste of time if I were 
to enumerate and answer the points of objection to this view 
made by Davidson and others of his school, whose work seems 
to me no more than laborious trifling.. These microscopic 
critics forget that it is quite as uncritical to be blind to re- 
semblances as it is to overlook points of difference. . . . I 
am sure that any unprejudiced judge would decide that while 
the minute points of difference that have been pointed out 
between the Gospel and the first Epistle are no more than 
must be expected in two productions of the same writer, the 
general resemblance is such, that a man must be devoid of 
all faculty of critical perception who cannot discern the 
proofs of common authorship. The main reason for denying 
the common authorship is that, if it be granted, it demolishes 
certain theories about St. John’s Gospel.’ 


Again :— 


The Fourth Gospel, as I have said, has been the subject 
of far more serious assaults than the others. If the others 
are allowed to have been published soon after the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem, the fourth is not assigned an earlier date 
than the latter half of the second century. Such, at least, 
was Baur’s theory; but in the critical sifting it has under- 
gone, the date of the fourth Gospel has been receding 
further and further back in the second century, so that now 
hardly any critic with any pretension to fairness puts it later 
than the very beginning of that century, if not the end of 
the first century, which comes very close to the date assigned 
it by those who believe in the Johannine authorship.*® 


Again :— 
Now, with respect to external evidence, I have already 


expressed my belief that John’s Gospel stands on quite 


7 Historical Introduction to the New Testament, ed. 2, 1886, pp. 
210, 211. δ. ps 213: 


First 
Kpistle by 
same 
writer. 


Date 
of Gospel. 


External 
evidence. 


Conditions 
of author- 
ship met 
only by 8. 
John. 


Dr. 
Sanday’s. 


Advance 
of positive 
evidence. 


348 LECTURE VI. 


as high a level of authority as any of the others. Suf- 
fice it now to say that if it be a forgery it has had the 
most wonderful success ever forgery had: at once received 
not only by the orthodox, but by the most discordant heretics 
—by Judaising Christians, Gnostics, Mystics—all of whom 
owned the necessity of reconciling their speculations with 
the sayings of this Gospel.® 


Again :— 
The author of the Fourth Gospel was a Jew.!.... The 
writer was a Jew of Palestine? .... I regard it, then, as 


proved that the writer of the fourth Gospel was a Jew, not 
very distant in time from the events which he relates. Is 
there, then, any reason why we should refuse credence to the 
claim, which he himself makes four times, to have been an 
eye-witness of our Saviour’s life (i. 14; xix. 35; xxi. 24; 
1 John i. 1)? There is nothing against admitting this 


claim, but everything in favour of it? .... IJ think 
we may also conclude that the writer had been a disciple 
of the Baptist as well as of our Lord.*.... And no 


account of the matter seems satisfactory but the traditional 
one, that the writer was the Apostle John.° 


This is the evidence of Dr. Sanday, taken from 
his Inaugural Lecture before this University :— 


It is now some ten years since I published ἃ book 
(Authorship of the Fourth Gospel) on the subject, and in the 
meantime this question, too, has not stood still. I have 
already alluded to the remarkable change in the aspect of the 
external evidence. When I wrote I excused myself from 
dealing with this on the ground that its results were in- 
conclusive. This could not be said now. Justin, Tatian, 


® Historical Introduction, wut 3 Ibid. p. 275. 

supra, pp. 215, 216. 4 Ibid. p. 276. 
' Tbid. Ὁ. 268. ὃ Ibid. p. 284. 
2 Ibid. p. 271. 


LECTURE VIL 349 


the Clementine Homilies, no longer give an uncertain sound. 
If only the textual argument of which I have spoken 
holds good—and I have great confidence that it will be 
found to hold good—then it seems to me that the date 
of the Gospel is all but demonstrated. As it is, the 
date assigned to it by some eminent critics has become little 
less than ludicrous in the light of our fuller knowledge. 
Baur’s 160-170, Volkmar’s 155, Scholten’s 140, are all dates 
at which not only is it certain that the Gospel existed, but 
highly probable that it was already translated, or at least being 
translated, and that with a text some way advanced on the 
road of corruption. Jam running a little ahead of the proof 
in asserting this, but not, I suspect, very far. Dies docebit. 
But if the case is made out in all its strength, a priori con- 
siderations must yield, and the Gospel must take rank as the 
work of a contemporary, as it professes to be.® 

The Gospel of St. John presents an unique phenomenon. 
It contains two distinct strata of thought, both quite unmistake- 
able to the critical eye ; and in each of these strata, again, there 
are local peculiarities which complicate the problem. When 
it comes to be closely investigated, the complexities of the 
problem are such that the whole of literature probably does 
not furnish a parallel. The hypothesis of authorship that 
shall satisfy them thus becomes in its turn equally compli- 
cated. It is necessary to find one who shall be at once Jew 
and Christian, intensely Jewish, and yet comprehensively 
Christian ; brought up on the Old Testament, and yet with 
a strong tincture of Alexandrian philosophy ; using a lan- 
euage in which the Hebrew structure and the Greek super- 
structure are equally conspicuous; one who had mixed 
personally in the events, and yet at the time of writing stood 
at a distance from them; an immediate disciple of Jesus, and 
yet possessed of so powerful an individuality as to impress the 
mark of himself upon his recollections; a nature capable of 
the most ardent and clinging affection, and yet an unsparing 


δ An Inaugural Lecture: The Study of the New Testament. Oxford, 
1883, pp. 28, 29. 


Internal 
evidence. 


One key 
only fits 
the wards. 


Conclu- 
sion: 


Persona- 
lity. 


Anony- 
mity. 


Evidence 
largely 


350 LECTURE VI. 


denouncer of hostile agencies of any kind which lay outside 
his own charmed circle. There is one historical figure which 
seems to fit like a key into all these intricate wards,—the 
figure of St. John, as it has been handed down to us by a 
well-authenticated tradition. I can conceive no second. If 
the St. John of history did not exist, he would have to be 
invented to account for his Gospel.’ 


In presenting to you this sketch of modern criti- 
cal opinions, which, imperfect as it is, must now be 
brought to a close, | have made no attempt—though 
in our age it has been not seldom put forward as 
an excellence—to look at opinions altogether apart 
from the personality of those who have formed them. 
I make no claim to be able to estimate testimony 
without reference to the person who testifies. ‘The 
author of Supernatural Religion, in the Introduction to 
his Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays, adopts the opposite 
point of view, which he expresses in the following 
words :— 

I may distinctly say that I have always held that argu- 
ments upon very serious subjects should be impersonal, and 
neither gain weight by the possession of a distinguished name 
nor lose by the want of it. I leave the Bishop any advantage 


he has in his throne, and I take my stand upon the basis of 
reason and not of reputation.® 


And ‘Testimony, as Dr. Johnson reminds us, 
‘is like an arrow shot from a long bow ; the force of 
it depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. 


7 The Study of the New Testament, ut supra, p. 32. 
8 A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot’s Essays, 1889, p. vi. 


LECTURE VI. 501 


Argument is like an arrow from ἃ cross-bow, which 
has equal force though shot by a child”? But 
history is not chiefly a question of pure reason, and 
evidence is largely a question of reputation. What 
we want to know is, not what the very ablest man 
may from his own point of view conceive that the 
first and second century ought to have been, but what 
the first and second century were. And the special 
value of Bishop Lightfoot’s testimony to us is, 
not that he spoke from the throne of a bishop, but 
that he spoke as a prince among scholars, placed upon 
his throne by the universal suffrages of students. It 
is not that he was the successor of prince-bishops, 
and himself a prince among bishops, but that he was 
the humblest and most laborious of students who 
in singleness of purpose sought the truth with energy 
which knew not what it was to be weary, with in- 
dustry which knew not what it was to leave the 
remotest byways of knowledge unexplored, with 
anxious care which wiped the very dust from 
the scales of judgment which he held; who never 
trusted himself nor asked a reader to trust him, and 
never bade you take a step with him on a road 
which was not supported by arches of thought and 
builded up by buttresses of minute investigations. 

Of a witness to the first and second century, as to 


° Boswell says that Johnson under Crossbow, in a slightly 
called this ‘a beautiful image in different form, as from Boyle. 
Bacon’; but it is given in the See Hill, Boswell’s Lifeof Johnson, 
later editions of the Dictionary, — vol. iv. p. 281. 


a question 
of reputa- 
tion. 


Requisites 
ina 
witness: 


full know- 


ledge, 


perfect 
honesty. 


352 LECTURE VI. 


a witness to any incident, the first requisite is, Was he 
there ? Did he see what took place ? Now Bishop 
Lightfoot, pre-eminently among men who have lived 
in this century, fulfilled this requisite. He never at- 
tempted to write a page before he had investigated the 
principles and facts which he meant to teach. Start- 
ing from highest intellectual and moral gifts, with 
every advantage of most exact academic training, the 
early history of the Church became a first aim in all 
To him the 


persons, the places, the incidents of the first Christian 


his studies. He essentially went there. 
centuries became a living reality. The skeletons of 
the chroniclers were clothed with the flesh and blood 
He moved among them in the 
familiar intercourse of old acquaintance. And when 
he came to testify, he ‘ testified what he had seen.’ * 


of real persons. 


And the second requisite is, absolute honesty. I 
have read to you some opinions of others on the work 
of Bishop Lightfoot. 
echoes of the Church’s wailing when he was taken 


Our ears still listen to the 
from us. His transparent character is known to us. 
It is as the brightness of the sun, in the presence 
of which the earth-born mist of suspicion vanishes 


1 ‘Thedistinction betweentesti- satisfactory to my understanding. 


mony, argument, and authority 
may be briefly summed up thus :— 

‘In questions of testimony, I 
believe a matter of fact, because 
the witness believes it. 

‘In questions of argument, 1 
believe the conclusion to be true, 
because it is proved by reasons 


‘In questions of authority, I 
believe a matter of opinion, be- 
cause it is believed by a person 
whom I consider a competent 
judge of the question.’ Sir George 
Cornewall Lewis, On the Influence 
of Authority in Opinion, 1875, 
p. 18. 


LECTURE VI. 908 


away. ‘ We know that his testimony is true.” Who 
will think that such testimony is independent of the 
great personality which stands behind it? I have 
chosen this personality to illustrate our position 
because of its acknowledged characteristics, and be- 
cause I may speak more freely of one who, while 
in the freshness of memory he is still with us, has 
in bodily presence been taken from us ; but who will 
not also feel that, while this witness stands in the 
foremost rank, he is accompanied and followed by 
others whose personality joins with his, and that 
these witnesses together with their witness make 
the positive evidence of this age a strong confirma- 
tion of and a substantial addition to that of the 
centuries which have gone before, and a solid support 
for that of the centuries which are yet to come? 


At the mouth of two witnesses or three shall every word be 
established. 


In the next lecture it will be my duty to give 
some account of the results which are to be derived 
from recent discoveries and other actual additions 
to our knowledge of our present subject. 


AA 


ἐσ Ὺ δ ἡ ts 


@of \t ΒΨ 


they 


"ἅ 


μη 
jsf) Ἵ 


bhCT Uni, VEE 


‘OUR AGE’ 


RECENT ADDITIONS TO OUR KNOWLEDGE 


AP OTN AEIOMEN TI AOZAN EINAI; 

TINS FAP OT; 

TIOTEPON AAAHN AYNAMIN ἘΠΙΣΤΗΜΗΣ H THN AYTHN; 

AAAHN. 

ἘΠ AAAQ APA TETAKTAI AOZA KAI ΕΠ AAAQ EMISTHMH, KATA THN 
[AYTHN] AYNAMIN EKATEPA THN ATTH2. 


ΟΥ̓ΤΩΣ. 
Plato. 


LECTURE VII. 


Therefore every scribe who hath been made a disciple to the kingdom of 
heaven is like untoa man that is a householder, which bringeth forth 
out of his treasure things new and old.—Matt. xiii. 52. 


‘Our age’ is remarkable not only for the eminent 
writers who have given to us the benefit of their 
thoughts on the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 
but also for positive additions to our knowledge of 
the subject, the first numbers, probably, of an ex- 
tended series, the results of which no one can esti- 


mate.! 


1 What, for example, would be 
the effect of the discovery of the 
complete works of Papias? And 
we may be near to it. They were 
perhaps knownin the thirteenth or 
fourteenth centuries, as appears 
from the following extract :— 

‘Utinam vero ad nos usque 
pervenissent illa! Ht supererant 
quidem szeculo xili ineunte, ut e 
codicum MSS. catalogo circa 
annum Christi 1218 confecto eru- 
dimur quem ex ecclesiz Nemau- 
sensis tabulario erutum, cl. Me- 
nardus haud ita pridem evulgavit : 
ut proinde viri eruditissimi recte 
conjecisse existimantur, quod 
Trithemii quoque zetate, ut ipse- 
met innuere videtur, szeculo 
nimirum xv exeunte, eadem ex- 
stitisse potuerint: licet Caveus 


The earth has revealed facts which have for 


et Fabricius neutiquam id sibi 
persuadeant.’ S. Papias Hiera- 
politanus Episcopus, Notitia 11]. 
Migne, Series Greca, 1857, tom. 
v. p. 1254. 

About the same time there 
seem to have been four copies 
of the works of a Papias in 
the library of the monastery at 
Canterbury, one of which is de- 
scribed as ‘mpfectus,’ and one 
has the words ‘Luce ΡῈ Wyn- 
CHELESE’ attached. Bibl. Cotton. 
Galba, E. IV. pp. 194 col. 2, 135 
col. 2, 187 col. 1, 148 col. 3. 

Bernard gives references to two 
other works of a Papias, one in the 
Cathedral Library at Worcester, 
the other in the Library of Robert 
Burscough. Catalogi Librorum 
Manuscriptorum, 1697. 


State- 
ment 
of the 
subject. 


Width of 
field. 


358 LECTURE VII. 


centuries lain concealed beneath its surface. Monas- 
teries and libraries have rewarded the patient inves- 
tigation of scholars by discoveries of priceless value. 
Language has furnished its students with the key of 
hidden treasures. Criticism has, in the hands of its 
masters, arrived at inductions which must take their 
place in the domain of established fact. 

In entering upon this part of our subject it 
will at once be seen that a vast field of inquiry is 
presented to our view, and that we must limit our- 
selves to a mere reference to large portions of it. 
We cannot, for example, enter into any details of the 
interesting work of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 
of that of Mr. Wood in Ephesus, or of Mr. Ramsay 
in Asia Minor ; we must remind ourselves only of 
the discoveries of the Codex δὶ, Codex Sangallensis, 
Codex Tischendorfianus iii., and Codex Holmiensis ; 
of the Curetonian Syriac ; of the Epistle of Barnabas, 
of portions of the so-called Homilies of Clement of 
Rome, and of the Didache. But let us do this much 
at least, for our familiar knowledge may lead us to 
forget how much additional light has come to us, 
and is still coming to us, in this ‘ our age.’ 

Nor ought we to be unmindful how textual criti- 
cism in the person of students such as Lachmann, 
Tischendorf, Tregelles, Scrivener, Burgon ; and in 
these later days in the hands of Westcott and Hort, 
Gregory, Sanday, Wordsworth, and White, has dis- 
covered the links by which the text of our present 
copies of the Gospel is to be traced at least well 


LECTURE VII. 359 


back into the second century. Nor yet ought we to 
forget how, in special departments of this field, the 
labours of the Archbishop Bryennios in the East, of 
Cardinal Pitra and of Commendatore de Rossi in 
Rome, of the Abbé Martin in Paris, of Dr. Belsheim 
in Sweden, of the rising school of textual critics in 
Holland, of Professors Zahn, Von Gebhardt, and 
Harnack in Germany, of the American Professors Hall 
and Warfield, of the Dublin Professors Gwynn and 
Abbott, of many others whom these names do but 
represent, are daily increasing the mass of evidence ; 
and how the results all lie in the same direction. 

But there are some additions to our knowledge 
which claim from their immediate connexion with 
our own subject a fuller, though it must still be a 
fragmentary, notice.’ 


And in the first place let us consider the import- 
ance of a discovery in the practical utilization of 
which the University of Oxford took considerable 
part. 

M. Mynoide Mynas, a Greek scholar in the employ 
of the French Government, who had been sent out by 
M. Villemain, the Minister of Public Instruction, on 
a search expedition among the libraries of the Greek 
monasteries, brought from Mount Athos in 1842, 
among other MSS., one of the fourteenth century, 

2 Cf. generally Lechler’s slight have been saved some trouble in 
but interesting tract, Urkwnden- references, had I met with it 


funde zur Geschichte des christ- before this lecture was in print. 
lichen Alterthums, 1886. I might 


M. Ville- 
main’s 
search ex- 
pedition. 


Dis- 
coveries 
by M. 
Mynas. 


The Philo- 
sophu- 
MENA 


360 LECTURE VII. 


containing ten books, which professed to include a 
Refutation of all Heresies.* Among the other trea- 
sures which M. Mynas had acquired were a transcript 
of the long-lost ables of Babrius, a MS. of the 
Dialectica of Galen, and one of the Gymnastica of 
Philostratus ;* and attention was first naturally 
directed to these works of more general interest. 
The MS. treatise to which [I am inviting your pre- 
sent thought was not on a very attractive subject, 
and M. Emmanuel Miller, one of the officers of the 
Bibliotheque Nationale, in which these treasures had 
been deposited, described it in 1844 simply as a 


Manuscript of the fourteenth century on cotton paper, 


containing a refutation of all heresies.2 The MS. was 
incomplete, beginning in the middle of the fourth 
book, but apparently had never contained books 
ili. ; and book x., which is a summary of the 
work, gives nothing of the contents of books i.-iv. 
Further investigation convinced M. Miller that the 
MS. was part of the Philosophumena which had been 
published by Gronovius and the Benedictine editors 
as the work of Origen. 

He thereupon proposed to the delegates of the 
Clarendon Press to undertake the printing and pub- 


3 \ “ δι ν "»ὄ 
Κατα TAG@V αἱιρεσεῶν ἔλεγχος. 


* Cf. Rapport adressé a M. le 


réfutation de toutes les hérésies. 
Cet ouvrage, dun autewr anonyme, 


Ministre de Vinstruction publique, 
par M. Mynoide Mynas, chargé 
Mune mission en Orient in the 
Revue de Bibliographie Analytique, 
1844, v. pp. 80 sqq. 

° § Manuscrit en papier de coton, 
du XIVe siécle, contenant une 


est divisé en dix livres; mais les 
trois premiers manquent, ainsi que 
la fin.’ Ut swpra, p. 91. Cf. 
Origen’s Philosophumena ; or Re- 
Ffutation of all Heresies, ed. Miller, 
Oxford, 1851. Preface, p. v. 


LECTURE ὙΠ: 9501 


lication of the work. His proposal was commended 
by Dr. Gaisford, to whom he was known as a Greek 
scholar, and in 1851 the work appeared under the 
title, Origen’s Philosophumena, or Refutation of all 
heresies. The first three books and part of the 
fourth are wanting, as we have just seen, in the Paris 
MS.; but M. Miller found it possible to supply the 
first book from four previously known MSS. in 
Italian libraries. When attention was once directed 
to the work, it attracted the notice of scholars far and 
wide. A striking example of this is found in the 
fact that an article from the pen of Professor Jacobi, 
of Berlin, controverting M. Miller’s view of the 
authorship, appeared in the Methodist Quarterly 
Review of New York in October of the same year.’ 
From a careful examination of the contents of the 
work, Professor Jacobi comes to the conclusion that 
it could not be by Origen, but that it was certainly 
by a contemporary of Origen. Everything points, in 
his opinion, to the presbyter Caius, or to Hippolytus. 
But Caius he remembers was specially distinguished 
by his opposition to Cerinthus, of whom our author 
has nothing new to tell us. Caius ascribed the 
Apocalypse to Cerinthus, our author to the Apostle 
John ; Caius was a strenuous opponent, our author 
probably an advocate, of sensuous chiliastic views. 
If the matter of the work is minutely examined, it 


8 Origenis Philosophumena sive  edidit Emmanuel Miller. 
Omnium Heresium Refutatio. EH 7 Methodist Quarterly Review, 
Codice Parisino nune primum Oct. 1851, pp. 645-652. 


edited by 
M. Miller. 


Views 
held by 
Jacobi, 


Duncker 
and 
Schneide- 
win, 


Bunsen, 


362 LECTURE VII. 
falls in so strikingly with all we know of Hippolytus, 
as to leave little room for doubt that it was written 
by him; and it is also known that a work bearing 
this or a similar title was ascribed to Hippolytus by 
Eusebius, Jerome, Epiphanius, and Nicephorus, and 
that on the back of the seat of the statue of Hippo- 
lytus, which had been dug up at Portus in 1551, 
there were the names of writings which our author 
claims as his own. Professor Jacobi enlarged this 
article, and republished it in the fuller form in the 
German Journal for Christian Knowledge and Chris- 
tian Life.® 

Meanwhile Dr. Duncker had quite independently 
ascribed the treatise to Hippolytus in a review of 
M. Miller’s work in the Gottingen Literary Adver- 
tiser,? and undertook to produce an edition of the 
MS. This he commenced in conjunction with Dr. 
Schneidewin, but unhappily died before half the work 
was printed. His colleague completed and published 
the book in 1859, and their edition became the 
classical authority.’ 

Meanwhile also the Baron de Bunsen, who as a 
statesman and a diplomatist had special interests in 


8 Deutsche Zeitschrift fiir christ- 
liche Wissenschaft und christliches 
Leben, 1851, Nos. 25, 26; 1853, 
Nos. 24, 25. 

9. Gottingische gelehrte Anzei- 
gen, 1851, Stiick 152-155. See 
also the valuable English treatise 
by Wordsworth, S. Hippolytus and 
the Church of Rome, ed. 2, 1880 ; 


and the article by Dr. Salmon, 
Hippolytus Romanus, in Smith 
and Wace’s Dictionary of Chris- 
tian Biography, vol. iv. pp. 783- 
804. 

1 Cf. Hippolyti Refutatio om- 
nium Heresium, ed. Duncker et 
Schneidewin, Gottingen, 1859. 


LECTURE VII. 363 


the Great Exhibition of 1851, had written to Arch- 
deacon Hare telling him how in the midst of it all, he 


had been interested in this new discovery of a monu- 


ment of early Christianity, which he thinks to be the 
most important made on that ground for a century. 
His attention had been called to it by Dr. Tregelles, 
who told him what importance Dr. Routh attached 
to it, and he accordingly at once sent for the book 
and examined it for himself. He also came quite 


independently of other inquirers to the conclusion ἡ 


that it is the work of Hippolytus, and published 
the results of his investigations at great length. 

Dr. Lommatzsch, the editor of Origen, had also 
written to Bunsen to express the opinion that the 
work could not be attributed to Origen, and that in 
his opinion it was the work of Hippolytus. 

Dr. von Dollinger followed in 1853,? admitting 
that the treatise is by Hippolytus, but seeking to 
prove from the character of the work that the author 
must have been a schismatic and an anti-pope. 

The Abbé Cruice felt convinced that the work 
was not written by Hippolytus, and in the valuable 
Introduction to his edition of it, arrives at the hesitat- 
ing result that it is a ‘work ascribed to Origen.’ 4 

Baur was of opinion that the work was by Caius, 


2 Hippolytus and his Age, 1852, * Etudes surdes . . . . Philoso- 
4 vols., esp. Five Letters to Arch- phuwmena, 1853: Histoire de 
deacon Hare, vol. i. ; Christianity V Eglise de Rome, 1856 ; and esp. 
and Mankind, 1854, 7 vols. Philosophumena, sive Heresium 

5 Hippolytus und Kallistus, omniwm Confutatio, opus Origeni 
1853, Eng. Trans. Plummer, 1876. = adscriptum, Paris, 1860. 


Lom- 
matzsch, 


Von D6l- 
linger, 


Cruice, 


Baur and 


Fessler. 


Consensus 
of opinion 
in favour 

of Hippo- 
lytus. 


Import- 
ance of 
the dis- 
covery. 


364 LECTURE VII. 


and was supported by Fessler, from the opposite 
Tiibingen camp,’ but he has now no following in 
this view, and indeed seems himself to have aban- 
doned it.® 

titschl, Volkmar, Overbeck, and, with the ex- 
ception of Lipsius (who is still doubtful, and 
quotes the work as pseudo-Origen), almost every 
authority of first importance now accepts the view 
that the discovery of Mynoide Mynas has really 
placed in our hands an original work of Hippoly- 
tus which dates from the first quarter of the third 
century. 

The interest and importance of the work, which 
this University had the honour of giving to the world, 
have not been overrated. Now for the first time we 
hear of Justin the Gnostic ; now we know something 
more than the names of Monoimus, and of the Pera- 
ticl; now we have a much fuller treatment than 
before of the doctrines of Simon Magus and the 
Simonians. Now for the first time in the history 
of Gnosticism there was presented a theory not of 
dualism, but of pantheistic monism, not of emanation 
from the higher to the lower, but of evolution from 
the lower to the higher. The position of Basilides 
at the beginning of the second century, as disclosed 
in this work, which was unknown in modern times 
until it was issued by the Clarendon Press of this 


° Theologische Quartalschrift, 6. Christenthum und christliche 
1852, ii. pp. 299 sqq.; Theolo- Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhun- 
gische Jahrbiicher, 1853, Heft 1, derte, 2te Aufl. 1860, p. 344. 

3, and 1854, Heft 3. 


LECTURE VIL. 365 


University less than forty years ago, reminds more 
than one of its exponents’ of the position of Hegel 
in the nineteenth century. 

The question naturally arose, and was eagerly 
discussed:—Is this the true Basilides? Are we to 
accept the statements of Hippolytus as representing 
the founder of the school, or have they been influ- 
enced by the teaching of later disciples ? It is of 
course just possible that the explanation of the dif- 
ference between this new picture and the features 
previously known to us, is to be found in an exoteric 
and esoteric doctrine, or that Hippolytus presents 
the doctrine in an earlier, and Ireneus in a later 


stage of the development, both being alike representa- | 


tions of the personal Basilides. But most thinkers 
have felt that they must choose between the old and 
the new ; and whether we count names, or weigh 
them, a strong preponderance of the best critical 
opinion is in favour of the view that we have in the 
pages of Hippolytus a faithful representation of the 
original work of Basilides himself. This deduction 
is based upon an examination of the passages in 
Hippolytus, and a comparison of them with the por- 
tions of the Hvegetica of Basilides which are known 
to be preserved in Clement of Alexandria ; and this 
view has been accepted by, among others, Jacobi,® 


7 Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, sententias ex Hippolyti libro κατὰ 
1875, edited by Bishop Lightfoot, πασῶν αἱρέσεων nuper reperto illus- 
Ρ. 147; Schaff, History of the travit 1852, Zeitschrift fiir Kir- 
Church, vol. 11. p. 453. chengeschichte, 1876-7, i. pp. 481 

8 Basilidis philosophi gnostici 56. 


Which is 
the true 
Basilides? 


Critics 
generally 
prefer 
Hippo- 
lytus. 


Excep- 
tions. 


Opinions 


366 LECTURE VIL. 

Baur,’ Uhlhorn,' by Gundert, though he thinks that 
there is a dualistic principle in the Hippolytean 
account,” and by Moller.’ On the other side, Hil- 
genfeld prided himself on being the first to oppose 
this view, and has remained consistent in his convic- 
tions. He has been followed by Lipsius, whose 
opinion is of great weight, but who has taken an 
exceptional line on the whole of the Hippolytean 
question ;° by Volkmar,® and by Scholten.’ In our 
own country the prevailing opinion that Hippolytus 
represents the original Basilides has been maintained 
in a lecture delivered before this University by the 
late Dean Mansel, as Professor of Ecclesiastical His- 
tory,® and in an article by the Cambridge Professor, 
Dr. Hort, which leaves little room for any further 
investigation into our present material for knowing 


9 Christenthum und christliche 
Kirche, ut supra, 16 Aufl. 1853, 


* Theologische Jahrbiicher, 1856, 
i.; Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaft- 


pp. 187 sqq.; 2te Aufl. 1860, pp. 
204 sqq. 

1 Das SBasilidianische System 
mit besonderer Riicksicht auf die 
Angaben des Hippolytus, 1855. 

2 Das System des Gnostikers 
Basilides in Zeitschrift fiir lutheri- 
sche Theologie wnd Kirche, 1855, 
pp. 209-220; and 1856, pp. 37- 
54. 

3 Geschichte der Kosmologie im 
der griechischen Kirche bis auf 
Origenes, 1860, pp. 944 sqq. ; Zeit- 
schrift fiir wissenschaftliche Theo- 
logie, 1862, iv. pp. 452 sqq.; and 
Zeitschrift fiir Kirchengeschichte, 
1877-78, ii. pp. 422 sqq. 


liche Theologie, 1862, pp. 400 sqq., 
and especially 1878, pp. 228 
sqq. 

5. Der Gnosticismus, sein Wesen, 
Ursprung und Entwickelungsgang, 
1860, pp. 101 sqq.; Zur Quellen- 
kritik des Epvphanios, 1866, pp. 
101 sqq. ; Die Quellen der dltesten 
Ketzergeschichte, 1875, pp. 118 sqq. 

ὁ. Hippolytus und die rémischen 


Zeitgenossen, 1855; Ursprung 
unserer Evangelien, 1866, pp. 70 
566. 

7 Oudste Getuwigenissen, 1866, 
pp. 69 sqq. 

8 Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, 


1875, wt supra, pp. 144-165. 


LECTURE VII. 367 
the whole position of Basilides. Dr. Hort’s inquiries 
lead him to conclude that— 


The freshness and power of the whole section, wherever 
we touch the actual words of the author, strongly confirm 
the impression that he was no other than Basilides himself. 
Thus we are led independently to the conclusion suggested 
by the correspondence with the information of Clement, 
whom we know to have drawn from the fountain-head, the 
Huegetica. . . . We shall therefore assume that the eight 
chapters of Hippolytus (vil. 20-27) represent faithfully 
though imperfectly the contents of part at least of the 
Hxegetica of Basilides. . . .° 


M. Renan reached a similar conclusion quite 
independently, but having done so he is naturally 
more positive :— 


The author of the Philosophumena has without doubt 
made this analysis from the original works of Basilides.! 


This judgment has been arrived at, and is now 
generally held by critics of all schools of opinion, 
quite apart from any theory as to the Fourth Gospel. 
It is the result of an investigation into the sources of 
our knowledge of Gnosticism, arising out of the dis- 
covery and publication of the Philosophumena.? 


® Art. Basilides in Smith and 
Wace’s Dictionary of Christian 
Biography, vol. i. p. 271. 

1 ¢ T/auteur des Philosophumena 
a sans doute fait cette analyse sur 
les ouvrages originaux de Basi- 
lide.’ L’Eglise Chrétienne, 1879, 
p- 158, note. 

2 It is worthy of special remark 
that the reading which is given 


by all the editors in the opening 
sentence of this section is, as they 
themselves note, in opposition to 
the Parisian Codex, which is 
their sole authority. They read: 
Βασιλείδης τοίνυν καὶ Ἰσίδωρος, ὁ 
Βασιλείδου παῖς γνήσιος καὶ μαθητὴς, 
φασὶν εἰρηκέναι Ματθίαν. . .. 
(Duncker οὐ Schneidewin : 
Cruice. Miller makes the ob- 


of De: 
Hort, 


and 
M, Renan, 


This con- 
clusion in- 
dependent 
of any 
view of 
the Fourth 
Gospel. 


But this 
Basilides 
contains 
clear quo- 
tations 
from the 
Gospel. 


Meaning 
of φησίν, 


308 LECTURE VIL. 
But when we come to read these eight chapters, 
which with great probability, not to say ‘ without 
doubt,’ represent faithfully a work of Basilides, we 
meet with two passages which are—I think we may 
now say ‘without doubt ’—verbal quotations from 
the Fourth Gospel. 

The first of these quotations occurs in the twenty- 
second chapter of the seventh book, which is upon ‘ the 
origin of the world and upon sonship.’ In the earlier 
part of the chapter there has been a definite mention 
of Basilides, and this is followed by a series of refer- 
ences in the singular number, ‘he says.’* In the midst 
of the series there is one plural reference to the 
school generally, ‘as these men say.’* Then the 
singular recurs, and is followed until the definite 
quotation, ‘ And this, he says, is that which is spoken 
of in the Gospels,’ 


He was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world.° 


vious mistake of correcting P, Hofstede de Groot, Basilides, 


Ματθίαν, which he gives as the 
reading of the Codex, into 
Mar@aiov. All read φασὶν ; all 
give the MS. reading φησίν.) 
Taken in connexion with the 
contents of the section, and the 
remarkable use of the word φησίν, 
it is probable that the singular is 
to be preferred as indicating that 
the teaching is that of Basilides, 
in which the son played only a 
subsidiary part. They are, as 
teachers, one person, not two. Cf. 


Deutsche Ausgabe, 1868, p. 4. 
3 ΄ 
φησίν. 
4 ¢ λέ Sy ὃ Ὁ 
ὡς λέγουσιν οἱ ἄνδρες οὗτοι. 
5° Ἐπεὶ δὲ ἦν ἄπορον εἰπεῖν προβολήν 
τινα τοῦ μὴ ὄντος θεοῦ γεγονέναι τι 
οὐκ ὄν,--- φεύγει γὰρ πάνυ καὶ δέδοικε 
τὰς κατὰ προβολὴν τῶν γεγονότων 
οὐσίας ὁ Βασιλείδης---ποίας γὰρ 
a , a ͵ “ ε , 
προβολῆς χρεία, ἢ ποίας ὕλης ὑπό- 
θεσις, ἵνα κόσμον θεὸς ἐργάσηται, 
, « > , ΜΝ 
καθάπερ ὁ ἀράχνης τὰ μηρύματα, ἢ 
θνητὸς ἄνθρωπος χαλκὸν ἢ ξύλον ἤ 
τι τῶν τῆς ὕλης μερῶν ἐργαζόμενος 


LECTURE VIL. 569 


The second quotation occurs in the twenty-seventh 
chapter of the same book, which deals with ‘the des- 
tiny of the creature,’ where, in the midst of a series of 
references in the third person singular, ‘he says,’ ® 
we read :— 


Now that each has its own seasons (he says), the Saviour 
is sufficient proof when he asserts ‘Mine hour is not yet 
come.’? | 


That Hippolytus here represents some one as quot- 
ing the Fourth Gospel is admitted on all sides ; it is 
indeed quite impossible to deny it. I confess that I 


λαμβάνει; ᾿Αλλὰ εἶπε, φησί, καὶ ἐγέ- Ἦν τὸ φῶς τὸ ἀληθινὸν ὃ 
νετο; καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν, ὡς λέγουσιν οἱ φωτίζει πάντα ἄνθρωπον ἐρ- 
ἄνδρες οὗτοι, τὸ λεχθὲν ὑπὸ Μωσέως: χόμενον εἰς τὸν κόσμον.-- 
Γενηθήτω φῶς, καὶ ἐγένετο Johni. 9. 
φῶς. Πόθεν, φησί, γέγονε τὸ φῶς; 
5 > , > \ , ΄ 
ἐξ οὐδενός: οὐ γὰρ γέγραπται, φησί, 
πόθεν, GAN’ αὐτὸ μόνον ἐκ τῆς φωνῆς 
τοῦ λέγοντος, ὁ δὲ λέγων, φησίν, οὐκ 
ἦν, οὐδὲ τὸ γενόμενον ἦν. Τέγονε, 
φησίν, ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων τὸ σπέρμα τοῦ 

, ΄- , ¢ , , 
κόσμου, ὁ λόγος ὁλεχθείς "γενηθήτω 
φῶς, καὶ τοῦτο, φησίν, ἔστι τὸ λε- 

, » - > , 5 ‘ 
γόμενον ἐν τοῖς εὐαγγελίοις" Ἦν τὸ 
φῶς τὸ ἀληθινόν, ὃ φωτίζει 
πάντα ἄνθρωπον ἐρχόμενον 
εἰς τὸν κόσμον. Hippolyti 
Refutatio omnium Heresium, vii. 
22. Ed. Duncker et Schneidewin, 


p- 360. 
δ φησίν. 
σ ‘ , o δ. ~ a 
7 Ὅτι δὲ, φησίν, ἕκαστον ἰδίους Καὶ λέγει αὐτῇ ὁ ᾿Ιησοῦς Τί 
y+ , c A c ‘ λέ 4 > A \ , Μ y+ a ες 
ἔχει καιρούς, ἱκανὸς ὁ σωτὴρ λέγων ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί, γύναι; οὔπω ἥκει ἡ 


ε 2 ee 
Οὔπω ἥκει ἡ ὥρα pov, καὶ of ὥρα pov.—John ii. 4. 
μάγοι τὸν ἀστέρα τεθεαμένοι" ἦν γὰρ, 
φησί, καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπὸ γένεσιν ἀστέρων 

~ > a 
καὶ ὡρῶν ἀποκαταστάσεως ἐν τῷ 

, , ol 

μεγάλῳ προλελογισμένος capa. 


Ibid. vii. 27, p. 876. 


Critical 
opinions : 


Bunsen’s, 


370 LECTURE VII. 


should have thought it to be also impossible to deny 
that Basilides is himself here referred to, were it not 
that it has been denied. I know not who else in the 
whole school stood out so prominently that he could 
be referred to for an ipse dixit. For the purposes of 
our present inquiry it is not indeed of primary im- 
portance to ascertain whether this is the language of 
Basilides or of a disciple who represents him. If the 
disciple accepted the Gospel, he did so because the 
master had done so before him. But as a matter of 
literary criticism I invite you to a perusal of the 
context of the passages. ‘They are now easily within 
reach, and I submit that the natural, nay, more, the 
only reasonable interpretation of the whole is, that we 
are here reading the words of the founder of the 
school. We saw but just now that, as a question of 
history and philosophy, and quite apart from any 
inquiry about the Fourth Gospel, a remarkable con- 
sensus of critical opinion had expressed itself in 
favour of the view that these chapters come from the 
original Basilides. A certainly not less remarkable 
consensus of opinion, regarding the question now as 
one of the Fourth Gospel—you will of course see how 
the separate lines of investigation support each other 
—may be alleged in favour of the view that Basilides 
is quoting δ. John. 

Baron de Bunsen, to whose investigations of Hip- 
polytus we have referred, states in the preface to his 
work :— 


We have here, amongst others, quotations from the Gospel 


LECTURE VII. ay | 


of St. John by Basilides, who flourished in the beginning of 
the reign of Hadrian, or about the year 117; furnishing a 
conclusive answer to the unfortunate hypothesis of Strauss, 
and the whole school of Tiibingen, that the fourth Gospel 
was written about the year 165 or 170.8 


Dr. Keim says—I quote from the English transla- 
tion of the Jesu von Nazara :— 


In the first place, it is certain that the Philosophowmena 
repeatedly and distinctly introduce the Johannine quotations 
of Basilides, and of no other; ‘he says’ and not ‘ they say,’ 
as it would have been were the writer quoting Isidore and the 
chorus of successors: and if the possibility of some confusion 
is admitted—though the evidence of such confusion is weak— 
yet the fact remains sufficiently clear that the fourth Gospel 
actually existed in the time of Basilides, and that the 
Gnostics—masters and scholars—eagerly laid hold of the 
book.® 


On a question which is much more one of literary 
perception than of theological learning, you will 
attach very high importance to the opinions of M. 


Renan and of Mr. Matthew Arnold. 
M. Renan says without hesitation :— 


Basilides makes use of the New Testament for the most 


8 Hippolytus, ut supra, ed.  behalten, sosehr der Aufweis des 


1852, vol. i. p. v. 

9. ‘Tm Voraus ist hier sicher, dass 
jene Schrift wiederholt bestimmt 
die johanneischen Citate des Basi- 
lides einfiihrt und keines Andern, 
“er sagt” und nicht ‘‘ sie sagen,” 
etwa Isidor und der folgende 
Chor ; und mag man die Μὸρ- 
lichkeit einer Verwechslung vor- 


Rechtes schwiichlich ist, so fallt 
die Thatsache genugsam in’s 
Gewicht, dass Johannes zur Zeit 
des Basilides wirklich existirte 
und dass die Gnosis nachweislich 
in den Meistern und Schiilern 
sein Buch eifrig ergriff.’ Jesu von 
Nazara, 1867, vol. i. p. 144; Eng. 
Trans., 1876, vol. i. p. 196. 


BR? 


Keim’s, 


M. 
Renan’s, 


Mr. 
Arnold’s. 


372 LECTURE VIL. 


part in accord with the general consent, excluding certain 
books, especially the Epistles to the Hebrews, to Titus, to 
Timothy, but admitting the Gospel of John." 


Mr. Arnold is not less certain :— 


Now it is true that the author of the Philosophumena 
sometimes mixes up the opinions of the master of a school 
with those of his followers, so that it is difficult to distinguish 
between them. But if we take all doubtful cases of the kind 
and compare them with our present case, we shall find that 
it is not one of them. It is not true that here, where the 
name of Basileides has come just before, and where no mention 
of his son or of his disciples has intervened since, there is 
any such ambiguity as is found in other cases. It is not true 
that the author of the Philosophumena habitually wields the 
subjectless he says in the random manner alleged, with no other 
formula for quotation both from the master and from the 
followers. In general, he uses the formula according to them 
(κατ᾽ αὐτούς) when he quotes from the school, and the for- 
mula he says (φησί) when he gives the dicta of the master. 
And in this particular case he manifestly quotes the dicta 
of Basileides, and no one who had not a theory to serve 
would ever dream of doubting it. Basileides, therefore, 
about the year 125 of our era, had before him the Fourth 
Gospel.? 


Mr. Arnold follows the author of the Philoso- 
phumena to an earlier stage in Gnostic development 
in the East, and finds the predecessors of Basilides 


1 ¢J] se servait du Nouveau Tes- ἃ Tite, ἃ Timothée, admettant 
tament, tel ἃ peu prés que le Jl Evangile de Jean.’ LD’ Fglise 
consentement général avait fait, Chrétienne, 1879, p. 162. 
excluant certains livres, en par- * God and the Bible, 1875, pp. 
ticulier les Epitres aux Hébreux, 268 sqq. 


LECTURE VII. 918 


in the Naaseni or Ophites*? and the Ρεγαΐβ. These 
are his words :— 


So we must take the Naaseni and the Peratz, whom the 
author of Supernatural Religion dismisses in a line as ‘ obscure 
sects towards the end of the second century,’ we must take 
them as even earlier than Basileides and the year 125. 


Mr. Arnold continues :— 


These sects we find repeatedly using, in illustration of their 
doctrines, the Fourth Gospel. We do not say that they use 
it as John’s, or as a canonical Scripture. But they give say- 
ings of Jesus which we have in the Fourth Gospel and in no 
other, and they give passages from the author’s own prologue 
to the Fourth Gospel.* 


Τ have had occasion in a previous lecture to refer 
to the Clementine Homilies and to the fact that they 
are connected with an interesting modern discovery.° 
Our earliest knowledge of this work comes from 
Turrianus, who in his treatise on the Apostolic 
Canons in the sixteenth century ° made use of a MS. 
of the Homilies which is not now known. They were 
printed by Cotelier in his edition of the Apostolic 
Fathers of 1672, from one of the Colbertine MSS. 
in the Library at Paris. The manuscript was, how- 
ever, both defective—breaking off in the middle of 
the nineteenth Homily—and manifestly corrupt. 
Clericus published three editions, 1698, 1700, 1724, 
but without any fresh MS. authority. Schwegler 


> Cf. esp. Honig, Die Ophiten, > Lecture II. pp. 83 sq. 
1890. ὁ Defensio pro Canonibus Apo- 
* God and the Bible, 1884, p.  stolorum et Epistolis Pontificum, 
155. Lutetiz, 1573. 


The Cle- 
mentine 
Homilies. 


Dressel’s 
discovery, 
1837-53. 


Quotation 
now 
admitted 


374 LECTURE VII. 


published an edition of the work in 1847, which did 
not add much to what had gone before. Meanwhile, 
in 1837, Dr. Albert Dressel had observed, in the 
Ottobonian Library at the Vatican, a MS. of the early 
part of the fourteenth century which contained the 
hitherto unknown portion of the Homilies. From 
defect of eyesight caused by unskilful treatment, 
and by pressure of work which he thought more im- 
portant, he was obliged to postpone the publication 
of his proposed edition of the MS. A further delay 
was caused by the scarcity of modern books in Rome. 
At length the work was published in Gottingen in 
1853.’ Now the sixteen years during which this 
MS. was known to Dr. Dressel, but not yet published, 
were the most vigorous years of the Tiibingen school. 
The denial that the Fourth Gospel was quoted in 
the Clementines was necessary to the position of the 
school, and the denial was made both by Baur and 
by his followers, Zeller, Schwegler, and Hilgenfeld ; ὃ 
but here was a MS., the authenticity of which 
could not be denied, and it contained a quotation the 
source of which could not be questioned. Hilgenfeld 
and Volkmar at once admitted, in Baur and Zeller’s 
Year-book, that this was undoubted; and Hil- 
genfeld called attention to the changed position in 
various subsequent works.’ 


7 Clementis Romani... Ho- pp. 446-7 and 534. Cf. especially 
milie Viginti .. . 1853. Hilgenfeld, Kvritische Untersuch- 
8. Baur, Kritische Untersuchun- ungen diber die Evangelien Justin’s 
gen, etc., 1847, p. 576. der clementinischen Homilien und 


® Theologische Jahrbiicher, 1854, Marcion’s, 1850, with his Evange- 


LECTURE VII. 919 


There was no ground for discussion upon this 
point now left. On all hands the reference to the 
Fourth Gospel was admitted, and by no one more 
frankly than by Strauss in the Life of Jesus for the 
German People, which was published in 1864.! 
Zeller was particularly unfortunate in his asser- 
tions, for he published in the Tiibingen Year-book 
an article upon the Citations from the Fourth Gospel 
in the Refutation of All Heresies, in which he declares 
that it is in vain men seek for any knowledge of the 
Fourth Gospel in the Clementine Homilies.? This 
article was published in the year 1853, in Tiibingen, 
and at that moment Dressel’s new discovery, which 
was to establish that knowledge beyond question, 


must have been already in type at Gottingen. 


Another remarkable story of discovery in our 


own time is connected with the Diatessaron of Tatian,’ 


lien, 1854, p. 346, and his note in 
the Hinleitung in das Neue Testa- 
ment, 1875, p. 43. Cf. also refer- 
ence to position of author of 
Supernatural Religion in Lecture 
11. p. 84. 

1 “In dem erst kiirzlich aufge- 
fundenen Schlusse der clementi- 
nischen Homilien ist unliugbar 
die Geschichte vom Blindgebo- 
renen, Joh. 9,  beriicksichtigt, 
vielleicht auch an einer andern 
Stelle, Joh. 10, 3.’ Das Leben 
Jesu, 1864, p. 69. 

* “Die clementinischen Homi- 
lien, deren Bekanntschaft mit 
Johannes man vergeblich darzu- 


thun sucht.’ Theologische Jahr- 
biicher, 1853, p. 145. 

° Cf. Lightfoot, Contemporary 
Review, May 1877, and Essays on 
Supernatural Religion, 1889; Ezra 
Abbot, The Authorship of the 
Fourth Gospel, 1880 ; Adolf Har- 
nack, Texte und Untersuchungen, 
Bd. i. Heft 1, and art. Tatian in 
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1888, 
xxill. p. 80; Moller, art. Tatian 
in Herzog-Plitt, Real-Hncyklo- 
pidie xv. Ὁ. 208; Fuller, art. 
Tatian in Smith and Wace’s Dic- 
tionary of Christian Biography, 
vol. iv. p. 783; Hemphill, Dia- 
tessaron, 1888. 


on all 
sides. 


Zeller’s 
unfortu- 
nate 
assertion, 


Tatian’s 


Diates- 
saron. 


The 
modern 
discovery. 


376 LECTURE VII. 


the pupil of Justin. A dozen years ago when public 
attention was much excited by the appearance of the 
work entitled Supernatural Religion, and by some 
wise and many unwise reviews of it and replies to it, 
one of the questions to which special thought was 
directed was the old dispute of the critics whether 
this Diatessaron, or Harmony of the Four Gospels, 
which was known to have been composed by Tatian, 
did or did not include the Fourth Gospel. That the 
pupil of Justin Martyr was acquainted with the 
Gospel was clear enough from his Apology ;* but 
how different would the position be could it be 
fully established that he had or had not received and 
handed on, as a sacred writing of the Church, the 
Gospel according ἰο δ. John. And at that time no one 
of the disputants seems to have had the least idea that 
the key to this lock was not only close at hand, but 
had been discovered, and was waiting to be used. It 
had been for some years on Bishop Lightfoot’s book- 
shelves, as he himself tells us ; but it was in Arme- 
nian, and he had not then the means of sifting the four 
volumes which contained it.° The learned Dr. Lip- 
sius of Jena does not seem to have been aware, when 
he wrote the article on Apocryphal Gospels for the 
Dictionary of Christian Biography, that the Armenian 
version of the Dvuatessaron had been published.® 
Dean Payne Smith, one of the few English scholars 


* Oratio ad Grecos, capp. iv. ° Essays, ut swpra, 1889, p. 278. 
Vv. xiii, xix., ed. von Otto, ὁ Smith and Wace’s Dictionary 
Corpus Apologetarum, tom. vi. pp. of Christian Biography, vol. ii. 
18, 20, 22, 60, 88. p. 713, col. 2. 


LECTURE VII. OnE 


who could have read it, must have had it in his 
hands when he wrote for the same work the article 
Ephraim the Syrian, for he refers to the commentary 
on ὃ. Paul’s Epistles in the third volume of the 
Armenian translation of Ephrem’s works,’ and the 
translation of the Diatessaron was lying unnoticed in 
the second volume all the while. Bishop Lightfoot’s 
article was published in May 1877,° and the volume 
of the Dictionary of Christian Biography which 
contains the articles by Dean Payne Smith and Dr. 
Lipsius was published in 1880. And yet the 
Armenian translation of the works of Ephrem had 
been published by the Mechitarist monks as long 
ago as 1836, this Armenian translation had been 
noticed by Dr. de Lagarde in 1862, and at the very 
moment when all this discussion was taking place, 
had already been issued in a Latin translation from 
the press at Venice. 

The history of the Diatessaron is long, and our 
time is short. The story has often been told during 
the last ten years, and there is no need for me to tell 
it with any fulness again. The chief facts will suffi- 
ciently illustrate the importance of this recent addition 
to our knowledge. 

Now, in the first place, it was known from 


Reference 
to the 


Eusebius that Tatian had composed a Harmony of work 


the Four Gospels which he called a Diatessaron, 
though it is not clearly established that Eusebius 


7 Dictionary, ut swpra, p. 141, 8. Contemporary Review, May 
col. 1. 1877. 


by 
Eusebius, 


and Epi- 
phanius. 


378 LECTURE VIL. 
had any personal acquaintance with the work. His 
language seems, indeed, to imply that he was speaking 
of a commonly known matter of fact :— 

But their chief and founder Tatian formed a sort of con- 
nexion and compilation of the Gospels, I know not how, which 


he called the Diatessaron. This work is current in some 
quarters (with some persons) even now.? 


Epiphanius tells us how, after the martyrdom of 
Justin, Tatian went to the East and fell into all sorts 
of errors, and adds :— 


The Diatessaron Gospel is said to have been composed by 
him, but some persons call it the Gospel according to the 


Hebrews.! 

That is, Epiphanius himself knows nothing about it, 
and gives two reports which were current in his time. 
The second of these reports is a natural mistake of 
people who had heard of this Gospel in the region of 
Edessa, and of the Gospel of the Hebrews in the region 
of Aleppo, and understanding the language of neither, 
knowing only that they were both Oriental and both 
supposed to be heretical, took them to be the same. 
When he comes to speak in his own person of the 
Gospel according to the Hebrews he, as other Catholic 
writers, follows the Ebionites in connecting it with 


9. Ὃ μέντοι ye πρότερος αὐτῶν 
ἀρχηγὸς ὁ Τατιανὸς συνάφειάν τινα 
καὶ συναγωγὴν οὐκ οἶδ᾽ ὅπως τῶν 
εὐαγγελίων συνθεὶς τὸ “Διὰ Teo- 
odpev’ 
ὃ καὶ παρά τισιν εἰσέτι νῦν φέρεται. 
Hist. Eccl. iv. 29. See especially 
Bishop Lightfoot’s note on οὐκ 
oi) ὅπως, op. cit. p. 278: and 


τοῦτο προσωνόμασεν * 


Hemphill, Diatessaron, ut supra. 
Introd. p. xiv. 

1 Λέγεται δὲ τὸ διὰ τεσσάρων 
εὐαγγέλιον (Scaliger text, εὐαγγε- 
λίων) ὑπ᾽ αὐτοῦ γεγενῆσθαι ὅπερ, 
Κατὰ ἉἙβραίους tives καλοῦσι. 
Her. xlvi.1; ed. Oehler, Corpus, 
tom. ii. p. 710. 


LECTURE VIL: 379 


the Gospel according to 8. Matthew.? Beyond these 
notices in Eusebius and Epiphanius, we do not meet 
the Diatessaron on purely Greek ground, and these 
writers only prove that it was unknown in the Greek 
church. 

In the Western Church it is unnoticed under 
circumstances which make it practically certain that 
it was unknown until the time of Victor, bishop of 
Capua, in the sixth century, a name which will be 
remembered from its connexion with the Codex Ful- 
densis, and with a work on the Paschal Cycle. Victor 
found a Latin compilation of the four Gospels without 
any name or indication of authorship, and he was led 
by the passage of Eusebius, to which 1 have referred, 
to think it must be the same as the work by Tatian. 
His identification was not accepted by scholars, and 
as late-as Dr. Ernest Ranke’s edition of the Codex 
Fuldensis,’ it was generally thought that he had made 
amistake. ‘To this point we must presently return. 

This ignorance of the Dvatessaron in the Greek 
and Latin churches confirms the impression which is 
on every ground probable, that Tatian’s Duatessaron 
was written in Syriac and for the use of Syriac- 
speaking churches.* And when we come upon 


2 Her. xxviii. 5; xxx. 3, 138, andrino authore in Orthodoxo- 
14; ed. Oehler, tom. ii. pp. 222, grapha Patrum Monum. Basilez, 
246, 262, 264. 1855, pp. 116 sqq. 

3 Codec Fuldensis. Novum 4 This view is accepted by 
Testamentum Latine interprete Bishop Lightfoot, Zahn, and Hil- 
Hieronymo ex ManuscriptoVictoris  genfeld, and now by De Lagarde 
Capuani, 1868. Cf. Hvangeliorwm and Bithgen. Cf. Fuller, art. 
quatuor Harmonia, Tatiano Alex- Tatian, ut supra, Ὁ. 801 col. 1; 


Not 
known in 
Western 
Church. 


Known in 
Syrian 
Church. 


Written in 
Syriac. 


Homilies 


of 
Aphrahat. 


Doctrine 
of Addai. 


Theodoret. 


380 LECTURE VII. 
Oriental ground we at once meet with it. The 
erudition of the late Dr. William Wright has given 
good reason for believing—and Zahn and Lipsius are 
agreed in believing—that the quotations in the 
Homilies by the Persian sage and bishop, Aphraates, 
or more accurately Aphrahat, who flourished in the 
middle of the fourth century, are made from this 
Harmony ;° and Zahn’s views are accepted fully, 
perhaps too fully, by Dr. Georg Bert in a German 
translation of the Homilies which has _ recently 
appeared.° 

This is further confirmed by the Doctrine of 
Addai, an apocryphal Syrian work, which is assigned 
with much probability to the middle of the third 
century, and which professes to give an account of 
the church at Edessa. The people are described as 
coming together ‘to the prayers of the service, and 
to [the reading of] the Old Testament and the New 
of the Diatessaron.’ * 

The widespread use of the Dvatessaron in the 
Catholic churches of the East in the first half of the 
fifth century is illustrated by Theodoret, bishop of 


Wordsworth, Church History to 
the Council of Nicwa, ed. 4, 1889, 
p. 482, note by J(ohn) S(arum) ; 
and especially the interesting note 
in Hemphill, Diatessaron, App. 
A, pp. 53-4. 

> Wright, Homilies of Aphraates 
(Syriac), vol. i. 1869. Cf. espe- 
cially Zahn, Forschungen, 1881, 
vol, i. pp. 72-89. 

ὁ Bert, Aphrahats des persischen 


Weisen Homilien aus dem Syrischen 

dibersetzt und erliiutert. Von Geb- 
hardt u. Harnack, Texte u. Unter- 
suchungen, 1888, Bd. ui. Heft 3 
and 4. 

7 Cureton, Ancient Syriac Docu- 
ments, 1864, p. 15; Phillips, The 
Doctrine of Adda, 1876, p. 34 
and note. On the text, see note 
in Ezra Abbot, Authorship, ut 
supra, p. 53. 


LECTURE VII. 381 


Cyrrhus, near the Euphrates, from a.p. 420 or 423 to 
A.D. 407 or 458, who testifies that ‘ Tatian composed 
the Gospel which is called Diatessaron,’ and tells us 
how he found more than two hundred copies in use 
and put them away, and introduced in their place 
the Gospels of the four Evangelists.® 

Our next firm ground is reached only after a con- 
siderable leap. Dionysius Bar-Salibi, an Armenian 
bishop of the twelfth century, speaks of a Commentary 
which was written on the Diatessaron by the well- 
known Syrian Father, Ephraim of Edessa. His state- 
ment " distinguishes the Diatessaron of Tatian from a 
Harmony by Ammonius—the two works being wholly 
different in arrangement—and says that it began 
with ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ He also 
speaks of a third and later Diatessaron composed by 
Elias of Salamia, who could not find the work of 
Ammonius and constructed one to supply its place. 
He himself quotes the works of Tatian and Ammonius 
in the same passage of his Commentary, making 
their distinctness absolute.? 

In the year 1836 the Mechitarist Fathers of the 


8 Kal τὰ τῶν τεττάρων evayye- 
λιστῶν ἀντεισήγαγον EvayyéAva.— 
Hereticarum Fabularum Compen- 
dium, i. cap. 20; ed. Migne, iv. 
p. 372. 

® Assemani, Bibliotheca Orien- 
‘as, 1. p. Of ; {| pp. 159 sq: 

1 ¢Preter Ephremum vero, 
Chrysostomum, Cyrillum, Mosen 
Barcepham, et Joannem Daren- 
sem, quibus Bar-Salibeeum usum 


fuisse supra dixi, auctores hi ab 
ipso citantur : videlicet, Dionysius 
epist. ad Timotheum, fol. 262. 
Clemens epist. adversus eos, qui 
matrimonium rejiciunt, fol. 155. 
Ammonit, et Tatiani Diatessaron, 
fol. 30.’ Ibid. ii. p. 158 ; cf. Bishop 
Lightfoot, Essays, 1889, wt supra, 
pp. 280 sq.; Hilgenfeld, Hinlei- 
tung, p. 77. 


Bar- 
Salibi. 


The Me- 
chitarist 


Fathers. 


Dr. 
MOsinger. 


Ezra 
Abbot. 


382 LECTURE VIL. 


Monastery of San Lazaro, in Venice, published the 
collected works of Ephraim in Armenian, in four 
octavo volumes, the second of which contained this 
Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron, from an Arme- 
nian version of the fifth century. The work natu- 
rally attracted little attention, the Armenian language 
being hardly known in Western Europe; but Father 
Aucher, one of the monks of San Lazaro, made a 
literal Latin translation, which he placed in the 
hands of Dr. Mésinger, Professor of Biblical Criticism, 
at Salzburg, who compared it with one of the Armenian 
codices and published it in Venice in 1876.7 European 
scholars did not, as we have seen, at once awake to 
the importance of the discovery. A passing notice 
appeared, indeed, in Schiirer’s Literary Journal ὃ but 
does not seem to have attracted attention ; and by a 
strange fate it remained for Dr. Ezra Abbot, in a paper 
to which I have more than once referred, read before a 
Ministers’ Institute in America, to invite the atten- 
tion of scholars in Europe to this treasure from the 
East, which had long been hidden, and now had been 
made known in their midst. ‘The important contri- 
butions of Drs. Zahn, Harnack, Wace, and others, 
soon followed ; and there is now a general agreement 
among the scholars who have devoted special atten- 
tion to this subject, that we have in our hands 
a commentary which is written in Armenian of the 


2 Aucher and Mésinger, Hvan- 3 Theologische Literaturzeitung, 
gelit concordantis Expositio facta a 1878, No. 25, p. 607. 
Sancto Ephremo, Venice, 1876. 


LECTURE VII. 383 


fifth century, which Armenian is an extremely literal 
translation from the Syriac, which Syriac is a writ- 
ing of Ephrem, which writing of Ephrem is his Com- 
mentary on the Diatessaron of Tatian. 

The special contribution which Dr. Wace made 
to the subject was the investigation of the relation 
between the Diatessaron of Tatian and the Harmony 
of Victor of Capua, to which reference has already 
been made; and the result of an elaborate ana- 
lysis is to establish their substantial identity, with 
the natural difference that in Victor’s Gospel the 
text of Tatian appears in Jerome’s Latin, whereas 
Ephraim’s Commentary was upon the Syriac text. 
Another link, which we must not now be tempted 
to follow, connects Tatian not only through a 
Latin translation with Victor, but through an old 
German translation of Victor’s Latin Coder, with 
the Saxon epic the Heliand,* with the martyr Boni- 
face, and with much of old German literature and 
Christianity.° 

While these investigations were being published 
by Dr. Wace in an English periodical, Dr. Zahn 
was issuing from the press his elaborate monograph 
on the Diatessaron,’ which not only dealt minutely 
with all the historical and other side questions, con- 
firming the results which Dr. Wace and others 
had arrived at independently, but also attempted 

4 Deutsche Dichtungen des Mit- pp. 1-11; 128-137; 193-205. See 
telalters. IV. Heliand, by Riickert, zbid., 1882, pp. 161-171; 294-312. 


1876. ° Forschungen, 1881, vol. i. 
ὅ Dr. Wace, Expositor, 1881, Tatian’s Diatessaron. 


Dr. Wace. 


Dr. Zahn’s 
restora- 
tion of the 
text. 


Older than 
the Cure- 
tonian 
Syriac. 


Result 
stated by 


384 LECTURE VII. 
to reconstruct, on the basis of Mésinger’s edition of 
Ephraim’s Commentary, together with the quotations 
in Aphrahat, the original text of the Dvatessaron. 
Whatever opinion may be formed as to some of the 
results of this bold attempt, which have naturally 
been challenged, the work remains as a striking ex- 
ample of critical acumen and devoted labour. It may 
not be proved that the Diatessaron was originally 
written in Syriac, though this, if Dr. Harnack will 
allow me to say so, is now hardly doubtful, or that 
the Syriac of Tatian proves the still earlier existence 
of the Syriac of Cureton. This latter point Zahn 
has himself abandoned. In a letter which he was 
kind enough to address to me, dated April 24th, 
1888, he says :— 

In reality I have not changed my first opinion. Only that 
I am now agreed with Bithgen in Der griechische Text des 
Oureton’schen Syrers, 1885, that the Syriac of the Diatessaron 
is older than the Curetonian. I had not examined this side 


of the question with sufficient thoroughness when I first 
wrote upon it.’ 


But in any case this one great fact remains. 
Here is in substance Tatian’s Diatessaron. The fact 
itself and the consequences which are to be drawn 


Cur. 


7 “Im Wesentlichen habe ich 
meine anfingliche Ansicht nicht 
geiindert. Nur darin bin ich jetzt 
mit Bathgen Der griechische Text 
des Oureton’schen Syrers, 1885, 
einverstanden, dass das syrische 
Diatessaron alter ist als der Syrus 


Diese Seite der Frage hatte 
ich nicht griindlich genug erwogen, 
als ich zuerst dariiber schrieb.’ 
Cf. Geschichte des Neutestament- 
lichen Kanons, 1888, Bd. i. pp. 
406 sq. 


LECTURE VII. 385 


from it will gain in emphasis by being expressed in 
the words of Dr. Adolf Harnack, who is not too 
friendly a critic of Zahn :— 


In details much of what Zahn has given as belonging to 
the text of the Diatessaron remains problematical, . . . but 
in all the main points his restoration has been successful. 
The rediscovery of such a work is in a variety of ways of the 
very highest importance for the early history of Christianity. 

. We learn from the Diatessaron that about 160 A.D. our 
four Gospels had already taken a place of prominence in the 
church and that no others had done so; that in particular 
the Fourth Gospel had taken a fixed place alongside of the 
three synoptics.® 


Nor does the romantic history of the Diatessaron 
end here. The interest which was excited by Dr. 
Zahn’s remarkable investigations led to the publica- 
tion of fuller information than had been previously 
available about an Arabic MS. of the Diatessaron 
which was known to exist in the Vatican Library.® 
Zahn himself knew it only from the writings of 
Assemani, Rosenmiiller, and Aberklad ;! but in the 
fourth volume of Cardinal Pitra’s Analecta Sacra, 
which was published in 1888, there appeared a full 
account of this version from the pen of Father Ciasca,? 
with a half promise that he might at some time in the 
future be able to edit it. Meanwhile his account of 


8 Encyclopedia Britannica, Spicilegio Solesmensi parata, tom. 


1888, xxiii. p. 81. iv. pp. 465-487 (De Tatiani 
9 Cod. Vat. Arab. xiv. Diatessaron Arabica Versione, P. 
1 Forschungen, ut swpra, pp. Augustinus Ciasca, Ordinis S. 
294-298. Augustini, published also separ: 


? Cardinal Pitra, Analecta Sacra ately). 
C CO 


Dr: 
Harnack, 


Arabic 
MS. in 
Vatican, 


Arabic 
MS. in 


Egypt, 


edited by 


386 LECTURE VII. 


it confirmed Zahn’s opinion of its close connexion 
with the Syriac Dzatessaron.® 

Leisure did not come to Father Ciasca more than 
to others, and the MS. was therefore handed over, in 
1885, to Professor de Lagarde,t who proposed to 
edit it, but to him came difficulties of both time and 
type, and the work was returned to Father Ciasca. 
Meanwhile the vicar apostolic of the Copts, Rmus 
Antonius Morcos, when on a visit to Rome, was 
shown the treasures of the Vatican, and on looking at 
this Arabic MS. remembered that he had seen one like 
it in Egypt. He forwarded the Egyptian treasure to 
Rome, and it proved to be such a beautiful specimen 
of caligraphy that the scribes of the Vatican selected 
it to publish as an offering to the pope at his jubilee. 
This gave Father Ciasca the opportunity of editing, 


3 ¢Td vero (ut ad rem nostram 
veniamus) potiori ratione dici 
debet de Diatessaron in codice 
arabico Vaticano No. xiv. con- 


_ tento, ut ipse Zahn suspicatus 


est, qui ejusdem codicis integram 
editionem perutilem putat. a- 
dem omnino opinio nobis est, 
qui, si facultas esset, id libenter 
prestaremus. Verum cum an- 
gustia temporis, saltem hoc anno, 
id operis perficere minime sinat, 
contenti erimus talem exhibere 
codicis descriptionem que satis 
sit ad confirmandum viri eruditi 
opinionem, intimum nempe dari 
nexum inter hoc opus ac syriacum 
Diatessaron. Quinimo cum textus 
arabici codicis e fonte syriaco 
directe proveniat, ut inferius fuse 


probabitur, fit inde, ut ejusdem 
larga notitia, non modo ad con- 
frmandum textum = syriacum 
quoad Evangeliorum concordan- 
tiam, verum etiam ad ipsum tex- 


tum  restituendum, plurimum 
valeat.’ Analecta, ut supra, p. 
466. 


* “Septem tantum pagellas im- 
pressit, quas edidit in Nachricten 
von der kiniglichen Gesellschaft der 
Wissenschaften und der Georg- 
Augusts-Universittit wu Géittin- 
gen, 17. Miirz, 1886, No. 4, pagg. 
151-158.’ Tatiani Evangeliorwm 
Harmonize Arabice nunc primum 
ex duplici codice edidit et transla- 
tione Latina donavit P. Augus- 
tinus Ciasca, Rome, 1888, note, 


Bim 


LECTURE VIL. 387 


with an introduction full of interesting information, 
both the Arabic MSS. of the Diatessaron in a work 
which appeared at Rome in 1888.° The Codex Bor- 
goanus, as Ciasca called the second MS., is professedly 
an Arabic translation from the Syriac of Tatian’s 
Diatessaron, and supplies many of the lacune which 
existed in the Vatican MS. The claim to be a 
translation of the Diatessaron is fully borne out by a 
comparison of Father Ciasca’s Latin rendering with 
Professor Mésinger’s rendering of the Armenian 
version; and both these Arabic versions afford, as 
their learned editor shows, strong support to the 
various steps by which, during the last few years, 
we have been led to the restoration of Tatian’s 
Diatessaron. 


Padre 
Ciasca. 


As we pass from it, let us remember that if these Import- 


steps are established, and if we are really in the pre- 
sence of a Harmony of the Four Gospels which was 
composed by Tatian the pupil of Justin, and included 
our present Fourth Gospel, then there follow neces- 
sarily not only the deductions which I gave just now 
in the words of Dr. Harnack, but the more important 
deduction still that it cannot be reasonably doubted 
that the Fourth Gospel was received by Justin as by 
Tatian, and that the Gospels of the pupil were iden- 
tical with the Memoirs of the master.® 


Another instance in which recent investigations 
have cast light upon a point which is of considerable 


5. Ciasca, Tatiani, ut supra. ® Cf. Lecture II. pp. 70 sq. 


co 2 


ance of 
this 
discovery. 


The mar- 
tyrdom 


of Poly- 
carp. 


Older 
view, 


ΑΙ 167. 


The key. 


Usher, 
Pearson, 
and 
others. 


388 LECTURE VII. 


importance in connexion with our subject, is the date 
of the martyrdom of Polycarp.’ Five and twenty 
years ago the date which was accepted by almost 
universal consent was the year A.D. 167. This was 
supposed, but without sufficient reason, to be based 
upon a passage in the Chronicon of Eusebius, which 
was read as though it placed the martyrdom in the 
seventh year of Marcus Aurelius, while, as a matter 
of fact, the martyrdom is not placed opposite the 
year, but below it, without a date, and grouped with 
other events.2 The mistake was one which it was 
easy to make, and which when made it was natural 
to follow. 

An independent key to the chronology of Poly- 
carp is furnished by the life of the rhetorician, A/lius 
Aristides, who refers twice, in certain Sacred Dis- 
courses which are included in his works, to one 
Quadratus, a proconsul of Asia, that is, to the pro- 
consul who was in office at the time of Polycarp’s 
martyrdom. 

The keen sight of dited cht yenes τοῖο Hug 
clue; and it was afterwards investigated by Valesius, 
Bishop Pearson, and Cardinal Noris, but without 
very satisfactory results. Masson carried the inquiry 
further,’ fixing the date at a.p. 166; but his whole 


’ Bishop Lightfoot, 
Fathers, 1885, i. pp. 629 sq.; ed. 
2, 1889, i. pp. 646 sqq. ' 

8 Bishop Lightfoot, op. cit., 
p. 629, ed. 2, vol. i. p. 647. The 
Armenian version of the Chroiicon 
is quoted on pp. 557 sqq. Cf. 


Apostolic: 


‘ Husebit Chronicorum Canonum, ed. 


Schoene, 1866, tom. ii. p. 170. 

® Aristides, Ἱεροὶ λόγοι, ed. 
Dindorf, 1829, vol. ii., contains 
Masson’s Collectanea Historica ; 
first published with Jebb’s Ari- 
stides, Oxford, 1722. 


LECTURE VII. 389 


argument is vitiated by the mistaken interpretation 
of Eusebius. | 

A hundred years later Letronne ' showed that the 
chronology must be pushed back, and Borghesi? in 
the next generation carried his conclusions further by 
the light of special study of the tenure of Roman 
offices. He placed the condemnation of Polycarp by 
Quadratus in A.D. 155. 

In the year 1867 Μ. Waddington followed * with 
a complete reconstruction of the chronology of 
Aristides. The key-stone is the proconsulship of 
Julianus, who is also mentioned by Aristides, and this 
date is fixed by an apparently unimportant inscrip- 
tion which was discovered in March 1864 by Mr. 
J. T. Wood in the excavations at the Odeum in 
Ephesus,* together with an Ephesian medal com- 
memorating the marriage of M. Aurelius (Verus 
Ceesar) and Faustina.? After most minute investiga- 
tion and careful dovetailing of incidents—we cannot 
here follow the remarkable detailed argument—M. 
Waddington came to the conclusion that Quadratus 
was proconsul of Asia in A.D. 155-56, and that the 
‘great Sabbath’ on which Polycarp was martyred was 


sur 


1 Letronne, Recherches 
V Egypte, 1823, pp. 257 sqq. 

2 Borghesi, Iscrizioni di Sepino, 
1852. 

3 Waddington, Vie du Rhéteur 
Aelius Aristide in Mémoires de 
VInstitut, etc.; Inscriptions οὐ 
Belles Lettres, 1867, xxvi. pp. 209 
sq.; and Fastes des Provinces Asia- 
tiques in Le Bas and Waddington’s 


Asie Minewre, Inscriptions Gtrec- 
ques et Latines, 1870, tom. 11. pt. 
i. pp. 655-744 ; No. 188, pp. 726 
sq. ; Wood, Discoveries at Ephesus, 
1877; Studia Biblica, Oxford, 
1885, No. ix., Randell. 


* Waddington, op. cit. Inscr. 
V. lil. p. 6. 
° Waddington, op. cit., Mé- 


movres, Ὁ. 211. 


Letronne 
and 
Borghesi. — 


M. Wad- 
dington 
decides 
for 


Feb. 23, 


A.D. 155. 


General 
accept- 
ance of 
this 
result. 


390 LECTURE VIL. 


the twenty-third day of February a.p. 155. This is 
the year, you will remember, which had been fixed by 
the earlier inquiries of Letronne and Borghesi. 

A result which shifted one of the chronological 
pivots of the second century backwards by eleven 
years was not likely to escape the crucible of the 
critics, and every known test was speedily applied to 
it. By the consent of almost all competent judges 
it has in every respect stood these tests. It is not 
only Letronne, Borghesi, and Waddington who now 
place the martyrdom of Polycarp in A.p. 155, but 
also Renan,® Aubé,’ Volkmar,’ Funk,’ Zahn,’ Egli,? 
Friedliinder,2 Marquardt,‘ Schiller,? Harnack ; ° 
Lipsius,’ Hilgenfeld,* and Von Gebhardt,’ prefer a.p. 
156 ; Keim! and Bishop Wordsworth? were not con- 
vinced ; Wieseler®? and Uhlhorn* adhered to the 


older date.° 


6 [?Antéchrist, p. 566; and 
L’ Eglise chrétienne, pp. 452 sq. 

7 Histoire des Persécutions, pp. 
319 sq.; La Polémique paienne, 
1878, pp. 184 sq. 

8 Jenaer Literaturzeitung, 1874, 
No. 274, p. 291. 

9 Patr. Apost.Opp., 1878, i. pp. 
lxxxill, xciv sq. 

1 Tbid., 1876, ii. p. 165. 

2 Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaft- 
liche Theologie, 1882, 1884, 1888. 

3 Sittengeschichte Roms, iii. pp. 
440, 442, 654. 

* Rémische 
1873, i. p. 375. 

> Geschichte der Rimischen Kai- 
serzeit, 1883, i. 11. p. 684. 


Staatsverwaltung, 


6. Encyclopedia Britannica, ed. 
9, vol. xix. art. Polycarp, p. 415. 
7 Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaft- 
liche Theologie, 1874, pp. 188 sq. 

8 Ibid. pp. 325 sq. 

9. Zeitschrift fiir historische Theo- 
logie, 1875, pp. 377 sq. 

1 Aus dem Urchristenthum, Bd. 
i. 1878, pp. 90 sqq. 

2 Church History, i. pp. 161 sq. 

8. Die Christenverfolgungen der 
Ctsaren bis zum 3ten Jahrhundert, 
1878, pp. 75 sqq. ; Theol. Studien 
u. Kritiken, 1880, pp. 141 sqq. 

4 Art. Polykarp in Herzog- 
Plitt, Real-Encyklopidie, ed. 2, 
vol. xii. pp. 103 sqq. 

> Cf. for these references : 


LECTURE Vik 391 


Bishop Lightfoot signified his acceptance of M. 
Waddington’s results as early as 1875,° and after- 
wards in his editions of the Apostolic Fathers” sub- 
jected the whole question, including M. Waddington’s 
essays, to a minute re-investigation, which, while it 
confirms that learned author’s results, does so with 
the addition of matter which is not less important 
than that of M. Waddington himself. The correc- 
tion of the error of centuries in the interpretation 
of the Chronicon of Eusebius, of which I have already 
spoken, has in effect removed the only serious diffi- 
culty in the way of accepting the year a.p. 155 as 
the date of the martyrdom. 

The importance of this rectification of date to the 
present question will be seen when it is remembered 
that Polycarp was eighty-six years old at the time of 
his death,* and that [renzeus speaks of him as a dis- 
ciple of John, and as appointed bishop of Smyrna 
by Apostles ; and again speaks of ‘the successors of 
Polycarp to the present time,’® that is, from a.p. 177 
to a.p. 190. If he lived from a.p. 70 to a.v. 155, 
both statements are natural; if from a.p. 81 to 
A.D. 167, neither is free from difficulty. Living 


Richardson, Bibliographical Syn- 
opsis, 1887, p. 10; and Bp. Light- 
foot, Apostolic Fathers, 1889, pt. 
ii. vol. i. pp. 667 sqq. The 
simpleststatement of the question 
in English will be found in Har- 
nack’s art. Poli carp, ut supra. 

ὁ Contemporary Review, May 


1875, pp. 827 sq. 

7 Ed. 1, 1885 ; ed. 2, 1889. 

® Martyrdom of Polycarp, cap. 
ix. Cf. Bishop Lightfoot’s note, 
Apost. Fathers, 1889, pt. ii. vol. 
i, paar. 

9. Adv. Her. iii. 3, 4; ed. Har- 
vey, li. pp. 12. 


Bishop 
Light- 
foot’s 
investiga- 
tions 
confirm 
it. 


Import- 
ance of 
this date. 


392 LECTURE VIL. 


from A.D. 70 to 155, his life and work link together 
S. John, Ignatius, Florinus, Justin, Tatian, Irenzeus ; 
and they become an argument for the authenticity of 
the Fourth Gospel, the force of which it is impossible 
to deny. 


The In the fourteenth number of the Dublin Herm- 
Herm- 
athena. athena, a collection of papers published from time to 
time by the members of Trinity College, and looked 
for by scholars with an interest which is seldom 
disappointed—this number was published in 1888, 
and the paper to which [ am about to refer is dated 
on Hippo, July in that year—appeared an article by Dr. Gwynn, 
ins an¢ the successor to Dr. Salmon in the chair of divinity, 
which is entitled Hippolytus and his ‘ Heads against 
Cuius. It gave us for the first time five passages 
from an inedited MS. of a Syriac Commentary on the 
Apocalypse, Acts, and Epistles, of Dionysius Bar- 
Salibi, to whose Commentary on the Gospels I have 
but just now referred. The MS. is part of the 
ftich Collection acquired by the British Museum in 
1830. The Heads against Caius are replies made 
by Hippolytus to some objections which Caius made 
to the Apocalypse, on the ground that it was 
opposed to the teaching of the Gospels and 8. Paul. 
In the first of these replies—I pass over the ob- 
jection of Caius which is not material to our 
inquiry—Hippolytus explains the passage ‘the day 
of the Lord cometh as a thief,’ by a reference 
to the children of light who walk not in the night, 


LECTURE VII. 09 
which is certainly Ephesian and probably Johannine.’ 
In the fifth ‘Head’ Hippolytus uses the words 
‘the Prince cometh and findeth no sin in me,’ 
which are a definite quotation from the Fourth 
Gospel. 
Caius is spoken of in these replies as ‘the 
Heretic, and it is clear that he did not, and that 
Hippolytus did, accept the Johannine authorship 
of the Apocalypse. It seems to be equally cer- 
tain that Caius as well as Hippolytus accepted 
without any question the authenticity of the Fourth 


Gospel. 


When 1 turn to the other side of this part of our 
evidence, and ask what fresh facts have been dis- 
covered which tend to cast doubt upon the Johannine 
authorship of the Gospel, I find no answer to the 
question. I cannot assert that no such fact is pro- 
ducible, but I must confess that if it is I have spent 
a good deal of time in a fruitless search, and that 1 
shall be much surprised if it has been made acces- 
sible in the ordinary channels by which such facts 
are made known. 


Pr Jonn πὶ 10%) xi 
Eph. v. 8. 

2 John xiv. 30. ‘ Observe that 
the quotation from St. John xiv. 
30, follows the reading εὑρίσκει, or 
εὑρήσει, for ἔχει. This reading is 
found in some copies, and in early 
patristic citations, and is given in 
the margin of the Harkleian ver- 
sion. It is noteworthy, that it is 


35, 36; 


adopted into the text of the New 
College MS. of that version, sup- 
posed to be the result of a recen- 
sion made by Barsalibi, and known 
as the Codex SBarsalibeus. I 
supply the diacritic point under 
iat from Bodl.’— Hermathena, 
No. xiv. Hippolytus and_ his 
‘ Heads against Caius,’ 1888. Dr. 
Gwynn’s note, p. 417. 


Both 
accepted 
the Fourth 
Gospel. 


No dis- 
coveries 
oppose 
Johannine 
author- 
ship. 


Frag- 
ments of 
Papias do 
not 
oppose, 


but 
support. 


Weight of 
this 
negative 
proof. 


394 LECTURE VII. 
Some stress was laid last γραῦν, ἡ indeed, on the 
discovery of fresh fragments of Papias which are 
probably from the Ecclesiastical History of Philip 
of Side, who wrote in the early part of the fifth 
century. The fragment which affects the Johannine 
question and makes Papias say that John the theo- 
logian and James his brother were put to death by 
Jews,” had been met by anticipation by Bishop 
Lightfoot, who, as long ago as 1875, explained quite 
satisfactorily ° the similar blunder of Georgius Hamar- 
tolos, which is also given on the authority of Papias.’ 
It is, moreover, more than counterbalanced by a frag- 
ment of Hegesippus in the same collection, which 
states that Domitian confined the Apostle and Evan- 
gelist John in Patmos.® 

And this negative proof which is furnished by 
recent additions to our knowledge is not less signifi- 
cant than that which is positive. In the very nature 
of things the positive evidence must be fragmentary. 


> See Jiilicher, Theologische Lite- 
raturzeitung, 1889, No. 13, pp. 


λέγει, ὅτι ᾿Ιωάννης ὁ Θεολόγος καὶ 
᾿Ιάκωβος ὁ ἀδελφὸς αὐτοῦ ὑπὸ ᾽Ἰου- 


331 sqq.; and cf. Hilgenfeld, δαίων ἀνῃρέθησαν, Ibid. No. 6, p. 
Einleitung 1875, p. 63, and Zeit- 170. 
schrift fiir wissenschaftliche Theo- ὁ But cf. on the other side 


logie, 1875, p. 269. 
4 Neue Fragmente des Papias, 


Schiirer in Theologische Literatur- 
zeitung, 1890. No. 6, p. 142. 


Hegesippus und Pierius in bisher 
unbekannten Hxcerpten aus der 
Kirchengeschichte des Philippus 
Sidetes von Dr. C. de Boor—Von 
Gebhardt und Harnack, Texte 
wnd Untersuchungen, Bd. v. Heft 
2, pp. 165-184. 


͵ ΄“-“ ΄ ’ 
5 Παπίας ἐν τῷ δευτέρῳ λόγῳ 
[7 ‘ « 


7 Bishop Lightfoot, Contempo- 
rary Review, October 1875 ; Essays 
on Supernatural Religion, 1889, 
pp. 211 sq. 

8 καὶ τὸν ἀπόστολον καὶ evayye- 
λιστὴν ᾿Ιωάννην ἐν Πάτμῳ περι- 
De Boor, ut supra, No. 


ὦρισεν. 


3, p. 169. 


LECTURE VII. 395 


Its value lies in the fact that it is fragmentary. 
A coin in Ephesus, an inscription in Phrygia, a 
burial chamber in Rome, a MS. in a monastery, a 
site in Samaria or Galilee—these are, if you will, 
not more than fossils of a past life, but, differing 
each wholly from the other, they tell of that life with 
unquestionable certainty, and they speak in voices of 
perfect harmony. Is further evidence asked for ? 
It exists in the fact that the whole field of our recent 
discoveries has disclosed not a single instance of coin, 
or inscription, or MS., or evidence of any kind what- 
ever, which is, I will not say inconsistent with the 
Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel, but 
which even suggests that any other person had ever 
been named or thought of as the author. 


I pass now to another branch of recently acquired 
evidence, which is not indeed independent of the 
discovery of new materials, but depends mainly upon 
the re-investigation of materials which were already 
known ; and my choice of instances is guided by 
their importance, by their general acceptance, and by 
the fact that it will be possible to state them briefly 
and refer to a full discussion which les immediately 
to hand. 

First among these instances will come naturally 
the Ignatian Epistles. The storehouse of materials 
relating to this subject which has been gathered 
during nearly thirty years by Bishop Lightfoot " 


9 Apostolic Fathers, part ii., hardt, Harnack and Zahn, Patrum 
1885, ed. 2, 1889. Cf. Von Geb- Apost. Opp., fasc. ii. 1876 ; Zahn, 


Re- inves- 
tigation of 
materials. 


The 
Ignatian 
Epistles. 


Bishop 
Lightfoot 
convinced 
on investi- 
gation. 


Dr. Zahn’s 
statement 
of the 
change. 


396 LECTURE VII. 


contains much that has been made accessible in our 
own age: as the Syriac Recension, edited by Cureton 
in 1845 and 1849 ; the Armenian, edited by Peter- 
mann, also in 1849 ; the Coptic Additions, published 
by Father Ciasca in 1883, and by Bishop Lightfoot 
himself in 1885; and all has been subjected to 
microscopic re-examination. The result is a decisive 
judgment for ‘the priority and genuineness of the 
seven Vossian Letters.’ ὦ 

It is the more striking because it is not the 
opinion with which the investigation was commenced. 
In the dissertation on ‘ The Christian Ministry,’ 
attached to the Commentary on the Epistle to the 
Philippians, the author writes :— 

Throughout this dissertation it is assumed that the Syriac 
version represents the epistles of St. Ignatius in their origi- 
nal form. .. . At the same time, I agree with Lipsius that 
the epistles of the short Greek recension cannot date later 
than the middle of the second century; and if so, they will 


still hold their place among the most important of early 
Christian documents.” 


The change of opinion is indicated in 1875, and 
is complacently described by Zahn in these words :— 


But there are at present in England—where excellent 
service was of old réndered on the Ignatian question—those 
who value truth more than the opinions of their countrymen, 
though these opinions have been received with the greatest 


Ignatius von Antiochien, 1873; Polycarp, 1885, vol. i. Preface, 

Funk, Die Echtheit der Ignatian-  p. vii. 

ischen Briefe, 1883. * Epistles of S. Paul, Philip- 
1 Apostolic Fathers, Ignatius, pians, eds. 1-3, 1868-73, p. 2382. 


LECTURE VII. 397 


applause in other countries; and it is to me a special satis- 
faction to observe that J. B. Lightfoot, a man of sober judg- 
ment, and having great weight through his exquisite learning, 
who formerly took Cureton’s side, has gradually come over to 
my opinion.® . . . In a paper published in the Contemporary 
fteview, February 1875, he said with great modesty that he 
could not decide between the three epistles of Cureton and 
the seven of Eusebius, but he wrote to me on the sixteenth of 
December in the same year in the following terms: I ought 
to explain that, since I wrote the article on Ignatius, I have been 
more and more strongly impressed with the unity and priority 
of the seven Epistles as representing the genuine Ignatius.‘ 


In 1879, in the new edition of the Commentary on 
the Epistle to the Philippians, the bishop gives the 


following note on his change of view :-- 


In the earlier editions of this work I assumed that the 
Syriac Version published by Cureton represented the Epistles 
of Ignatius in their original form. I am now convinced that 
this is only an abridgment and that the shorter Greek form 
is genuine; but for the sake of argument I have kept the two 
apart in the text. I hope before long to give reasons for this 
change of opinion in my edition of this father.® 


3 Patrum Apost. Opp., ut supra, 
Be Vi. 

4 “At sunt etiam hodie in 
Britannia, optime quondam de 
Ignatio merita, quibus magis 
amica veritas, quam opiniones e 
Britannia ortz, quamvis magno 
exterorum applausu excepts ; ac 
magno me affecit gaudio, quod 
I. B. Lightfootium, sobrii judicii 
virum ac doctrina exquisita pol- 
lentem, qui 6 _Curetonii parte 
quondam steterat, paullatim in 


eandem mecum convenire sen- 
tentiam cognovi. . .. cum in 
tractatu edito in Contemporary 


᾿ Review 1875 (Febr.) p. 358 mo- 


destissime dixisset hesitare se 
utrum tres epistule Curetonii ac 


_septem Eusebii genuine habende 


essent, litteris die 16 Dec. 1875, 
ad me datis hee mecum commu- 
nicavit... .’? Patrum Apost. Opp., 


ut supra, p. vi, foot-note. 


> Philippians, ut supra, ed. 
1879, p.' 234, note. 


Result. 


Still fresh 
materials 


598 LECTURE VII. 


In 1885 Bishop Lightfoot writes :— 


Indeed Zahn’s book, though it has been before the world 
some twelve years, has never been answered; for I cannot 
regard the brief and cursory criticisms of Renan, Hilgenfeld, 
and others, as any answer. 


And then adds, as always, modestissime— 


Moreover there is much besides to be said which Zahn has 
not said.® 


Another's estimate of what the bishop has himself 
said will help us to see the importance of the judg- 
ment which he has given :— 


It has been our wish to exhibit in all its bearings the main 
questions which Dr. Lightfoot has sought to answer; and we 
have no hesitation in saying that he has answered these 
questions with triumphant success. The genuineness of the 
Vossian letters has been finally established ; the wisdom of 
Ussher has been fully vindicated ; and the Ignatian contro- 
versy has been set at rest, with little chance or none of being 
again reopened. Dr. Lightfoot’s mode of dealing with the 
evidence which his unwearied toil has brought together, will 
commend itself even to those who may take up the book with 
prepossessions in favour of the Tubingen school of critics ; 
and his main conclusions will, beyond doubt, be accepted by 
all impartial and independent students and thinkers. Those 
who can appreciate, further, the critical skill, the vast labour, 
the wide range and variety of learning, and the conscientious 
care needed for the achievement of this great task, will feel 
erateful for efforts which, in spite of all hindrances and dis- 
tractions, have been crowned with decisive success.’ 


Nor has even the short period since Bishop 
Lightfoot’s work was published been without its 


® Apostolic Fathers, ut swpra, 7 Edinburgh Review, No. 335, 
Pref. p. vii. July 1886, pp. 136-7. 


LECTURE VIL 399 


additional evidence. A second edition appeared just 
before his death. He was able to announce fresh 
converts, including M. de Pressensé, who had pre- 
viously expressed a strong view against the Vossian 
recension, and is able to refer to additional materials, 
in versions, manuscripts and inscriptions, all of which 
support the view which he had adopted.® 

Dr. Harnack is well known to hold views differ- 
ing widely from those of Bishop Lightfoot on import- 
ant questions connected with the Ignatian Epistles, 
and he expresses these with his usual candid friend- 
liness in his review of the bishop’s work. But he 
has no doubt about the genuineness :— 


Whether these Epistles are genuine or not, is one of the 
main problems of early Church history. Upon the decision 
of this question depends more than can be indicated in a 
short sketch. After repeated investigations, the genuineness 
of the Epistles seems to me certain, and I hold the hypo- 
thesis of their spuriousness to be untenable. In this conclu- 
sion I agree with Lightfoot, and I also thank him for having 
removed many difficulties in detail which I had previously felt.° 


Dr. Harnack has held in connexion with his 
general view of the chronology of the bishops of 
Antioch, an opinion which is probably peculiar to 
himself as to the possible date of the Ignatian Letters, 
and his latest expression of it 1s :— 

8 Cf. Apostolic Fathers, 1889, and Schiirer has just endorsed the 
pt. ii. vol. i. Preface, pp. vii, viii. opinion (Ibid. 1890, No. 6, p. 142) 
9. Expositor, Jan. 1886, p. 10. —as ‘wohl die gelehrteste und 
Cf. Theologische Literaturzeitung,  sorgfaltigste patristische Mono- 


1886, No. 14, pp. 316-319, where  graphie, welche im 19. Jahrhun- 
Harnack speaks of this work— _ dert erschienen ist.’ 


confirm 
the view. 


Dr. 
Harnack’s 
judgment. 


Date of 
the 
Epistles. 


Johannine 
quotations 
about A.D. 
110. 


400 LECTURE VII. 


The Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp were probably 
written after the year A.D. 130.) 


But a consensus of the judgments of scholars has 
practically determined that the death of Ignatius 
cannot be placed later than A.p. 117.? 

One of the results of modern investigation then is 
that we possess seven Letters written by Ignatius, 
and addressed severally to the Ephesians, the Mag- 
nesians, the Trallians, the Romans, the Phila- 
delphians, the Smyrneans, and Polycarp. Nor is 
there further place for intelligent doubt that these 
Epistles contain quotations of the Fourth Gospel : 


1 Expositor, March 1886, p. 192. 
Cf. Harnack, Die Zeit des Igna- 
tius, u.s.w., 1878. 

2 ‘His martyrdom may with a 
high degree of probability be 
placed within a few years of A.D. 
110, before or after.’ Bishop 
Lightfoot, Apost. Fathers, ed. 
1889, pt. ii. vol. i. p. 30. 

‘... we shall be doing no 
injustice to the evidence by setting 
the probable limits between a.D. 
100-118, without attempting to 
tix the year more precisely.’ Ibid. 
vol. ii. p. 472. 

The following is a summary of 
the opinions of the chief autho- 
rities :— 

a.p. 105-117. Zahn, 
Smith. 

A.D. 107. Usher, Ruinart, Tille- 
mont, Ceillier, Gallandi, Busse, 
Wieseler, Mohler, Funk, Roberts, 
and D. Schmid. 

A.D. 114. Borghesi. 

A.D. 115. Chronicon Paschale, 


Ba, 


Volkmar, Ueberweg, Kurtz. 

A.D. 115-6. Lloyd, Pagi, Grabe, 
Smith, Routh, Gieseler. 

A.D. 116. Pearson. 

A.D. 1581. Harnack. 

See Richardson : Bibliographi- 
cal Synopsis, 1887, p. 15. 

3 Tt is not within the compass 
of a note to examine these quota- 
tions fully, but the following 
references will justify the state- 
ment in the text. The numbers 
refer to the pages of the edition 
of Ignatius in Bishop Lightfoot, 
Apostolic Fathers, pt. ii. vol. ii. 
1889. 

Ephes. ν. : ἐὰν μή τις ἢ ἐντὸς τοῦ 
θυσιαστηρίου, ὑστερεῖται τοῦ ἄρτου 
[τοῦ Θεοῦ], pp. 43, 44. 

Rom. vil. ; ἄρτον Θεοῦ θέλω, 6 
ἐστιν σὰρξ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, κ. τ. A. 

These passages are best taken 
together, as both are clearly sug- 
gested by the Gospel (cf. John vi. 
27, 31, 33, 48 ; and for the context 
the whole passage, vi. 27-59). The 


LECTURE VIL. 


that is, the result of our 
widely accepted criticism 


θυσιαστήριον is here the court of 
the congregation, and seems to be 
suggested by the Manna of S. 
John, pp. 225, 226. 

Two lines before the passage 
just quoted, the letter to the 
Romans contains the expression 
ὕδωρ δὲ ζῶν ἡ καὶ λαλοῦν t—‘ Doubt- 
less a reference to John iv. 10, 11, 
as indeed the whole passage is 
inspired by the Fourth Gospel,’ 
p. 224. If we adopt the reading 
ζῶν ἁλλόμενον from the Interpola- 
tor’s text, we have a further 
striking parallel with John iv. 14. 

Ephes. vi.: οὕτως δεῖ ἡμᾶς 
αὐτὸν δέχεσθαι, ὡς αὐτὸν τὸν 


πέμψαντα. p. 46. John xiii. 20. 


Ephes. xvli.: Διὰ τοῦτο μύρον 
ἔλαβεν ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς [αὐτοῦ] ὁ 
Κύριος, ἵνα πνέῃ τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ ἀφθαρ- 
σίαν. Cf. John xii. 3. ‘ Joannes 
vero exhibet quod preetermiserunt 
Matthzeus et Marcus, ἡ δὲ οἰκία 
ἐπληρώθη ἐκ τῆς ὀσμῆς TOU μύρου." 
Zahn, Patr. Apost. Opp. ut supra, 
p. 22. ‘ Zahn truly remarks that 
the allusion here implies a know- 
ledge of 5. John’s Gospel.’ Pp. 
72, 73. 


Ibid. : τοῦ ἄρχοντος τοῦ αἰῶνος 
τοῦτου,.., Again, cap. xix. Magn. 


1} Trall. iv., Rom. vii., Philad. 
G., Cio John: xi: 3); xiv οὖ: 
mute 11 0 70. 


Magn. vii.: Ὥσπερ οὖν ὁ Κύριος 
ἄνευ τοῦ πατρὺς οὐδὲν ἐποίησεν, 


401 


present most learned and 
on the Ignatian question, 


k.7.A.. p. 121. ‘Respicere Igna- 
tium ad Joann. v. 19, 30; x. 
30; xv. 4; xvi. 15, tantum non 
affirmo,’ Zahn, ut supra, p. 35; 
cf. Const. Apost. p. 54, 23, ed. 
Lagarde ; cf. also John viii. 28. 

Ibid. ad fin.: eis ἕνα ὄντα, Ὁ. 123. 
‘Quoniam autem redux e mundo 
apud patrem versatur, apte dic- 
tum est: eis τὸν ἕνα. . . non ἐν 
τῷ ἑνί. Cf. Joann. i. 18,’ Zahn, ut 
supra, p. 35. Cf. also Johni. 1; 
Rill Oy MV. 10. 928. xvi, 10) ΤῸ; 
17, 28. 

The chapter of the Epistle to 
the Magnesians to which these 
references are made, occupies ten 
lines in the large print of Bishop 
Lightfoot’s edition. 


Magn. viii. ad fin.: ὃς κατὰ πάν- 
Ta εὐηρέστησεν τῷ πέμψαντι αὐτόν. 


Ρ. 126. Cf. John viii. 29. 


Rog. 111. ad fin.: ὅταν μισῆται 
ὑπὸ κόσμου. Cf. John vii. 7; xv. 
18,19’; xvi. 14 5 15 Johw is 13: 
p. 205. 


Philad. vii.: ofdev yap πόθεν 
ἔρχεται kat ποῦ ὑπάγει, a 
definite quotation from John iii. 
8. ‘The coincidence is quite too 
strong to be accidental. Nor can 
there be any reasonable doubt that 
the passage in the Gospel is prior 
to the passage in Ignatius. The 
application in the Gospel is 
natural, The application in Igna- 
tius is strained and secondary ; nor 
is his language at all explicable, 


> B 


Other con- 
temporary 
writings. 


Epistle of 
Polycarp. 


402 LECTURE VIL. 


is to assert that the Fourth Gospel was received by 
Ignatius and by the churches of Asia Minor, includ- 
ing the church of Ephesus, at a date which 15 earlier— 
it may be several years earlier—than the year Α.Ὁ. 117. 

The dates of the Epistle of Barnabas and of the 
Didache are too uncertain for us to lay much stress 
upon them here as witnesses—both may be earlier 
than the death of the Apostle John; but they, as 
well as the Epistles of the Roman Clement and the 
Shepherd of Hermas, at least support the Johannine 
authorship of the Gospel by a stream of Johannine 
doctrine and phraseology which is too strong to have 
been accidental.* 


Closely bound up with the question of the Ignatian 
Letters, and standing or falling with them, is the 
genuineness of the Epistle of Polycarp.” This is a 
Letter of the martyr to the church at Philippi, exist- 
ing in a Latin translation which was first published 
in 1498. Of the Greek, only part has been preserved, 


and this was first edited in 1633. The external 


except as an adaptation of a 
familiar passage,’ p. 266. 


Philad. ix.: αὐτὸς dv θύρα τοῦ 
πατρός, Of. John x. 9 and Rev. 
iii. 8. Bishop Lightfoot notes 
that this latter image is also in a 
letter to the Philadelphians, pp. 
274, 275. 

* Cf. Patr. Ap. Opp., wt supra, 
esp. the Indices: and Charteris, 
Canonicity, 1880, pp. i-xxxiii and 
167-176. Reference may also 


perhaps be permitted to the article 
‘John, Gospel of,’ in the forth- 
coming edition of Dr. Smith’s 
Dictionary of the Bible. For the 
Didache, cf. Von Gebhardt u. Har- 
nack, Texte u. Untersuchungen, 
Bd. ii. Heft 2 ; Schaff, The Oldest 
Church Manual, ed. 3, 1889; and 
Plummer, article in the Church- 
man, July 1884. 

> Cf. Bishop Lightfoot, op. cit., 
i. pp. 562 sq. 


LECTURE VII. 408 


evidence of its genuineness includes Irenzus, who 
speaks of ‘a very powerful Epistle of Polycarp, 
written to the Philippians’; Eusebius,® who quotes 
the testimony which the Epistle bears to the Igna- 
tian Letters ;“ and Jerome, who tells us ὃ that it was 
publicly read in the churches of Asia. Everything 
in the Letter itself supports the statements which are 
thus made about it, and Dr. Harnack is justified in 
saying :— 

It would certainly never have occurred to any one to 
doubt the genuineness of the epistle, or to suppose that it had 


been interpolated, but for the fact that in several passages 
reference is made to Ignatius and his epistles.% 


But, if the Ignatian Letters are independently 
proved to be genuine, this argument against the 
Letter of Polycarp is not only cancelled, but it gives 
a considerable positive quantity on the other side. 
The Ignatian Letters are genuine: then the only 
argument against the Polycarp Letter disappears. The 
Polycarp Letter is genuine: then it strongly confirms 
the genuineness of the Ignatian Letters, which has 
been independently established. 

The importance of the genuineness of the Letter 
of Polycarp in the present question is indirect but 
therefore of the greater value. Beyond question it 
bears witness to the First Epistle of 8. John, and 


° Adv. Her. iii. 3,4; ed. Har- Benedict., Verona, 1735, tom. ii. 
vey, li. pp. 14 sq. p. 849. 

τ Hist. Eccles. iii. 36. ° Encyclopedia Britannica, 

8 De Vir. clust.cap. xvil.; ed. 1885, xix. p. 414. 


Dp. 2 


Dr. Har- 
nack’s 
view. 


Import- 
ance of 
the Letter. 


Silence of 
Eusebius. 


404 LECTURE VIL. 


equally beyond question is this Epistle a witness to 
the Gospel. The Letter dates from the martyrdom 
of Ignatius,—after the journey of Ignatius to Rome, 
and before Polycarp had heard of the martyrdom ; that 
is to say, not later than A.D. 118, perhaps as early as 
A.D. 112, there is a Letter of Polycarp which quotes as 
authentic the First Epistle of ὃ. John, which itself 
is subsequent to the Fourth Gospel and was written 


by the same hand. 


The name of Bishop Lightfoot will be remembered 
also in connexion with an induction which is, I venture 
to think, second in far-reaching importance to nothing 
which he has left to us on the early history of the 
Church. I refer to the essay on the Silence of Huse- 
bius, which was first published in the Contemporary 
Review in January 1875, and again in the collected 
essays on the work entitled Supernatural Religion last 
year.” This is not an example of new material, but 
a generalization from already existing materials. 
Eusebius is the chief source of information about the 
ecclesiastical literature of the second century ; and 
this induction, which is based upon a minute exa- 
mination of particulars, and was placed before the 
world as a distinct challenge now fifteen years ago, 
has acquired the position of a law of interpretation, 
the value of which cannot be too highly estimated. 
Let me read it to you in the author’s own words :— 


1 Cf. Lecture VI. pp. 346 sq. 
2 Essays on Supernatural Religion, pp. 32-58. 


LECTURE VII. 405 


‘ Hypotheses non fingimus. We have built no airy castles 
of criticism on arbitrary ὦ priori assumptions as to what the 
silence of Husebius must mean. We have put the man him- 
self in the witness-box; we have confronted him with facts, 
and cross-examined him; thus we have elicited from him his 
principles and mode of action. I may perhaps have fallen 
into some errors of detail, though I have endeavoured to avoid 
them, but the main conclusions are, | believe, irrefragable. 
If they are not, I shall be obliged to anyone who will point 
out the fallacy in my reasoning; and I pledge myself to make 
open retractation. .. . 

‘I now venture on a statement which might have seemed 
a paradox if it had preceded this investigation, but which, 
coming at its close, will, if I mistake not, commend itself as a 
sober deduction from facts. The silence of Husebius respec- 
ting early witnesses to the Fourth Gospel is an evidence in its 
favour. Its Apostolic authorship had never been questioned 
by any church writer from the beginning, so far as Husebius 
was aware, and therefore it was superfluous to call witnesses. 
It was not excused, because it had not been accused... . 

‘Tf any one demurs to this inference, let him try, on any 
other hypothesis, to answer the following questions :— 


‘(1) How is it that, while Eusebius alleges repeated 
testimonies to the Epistle to the Hebrews, he is silent from 
first to last about the universally acknowledged Hpistles of 
St. Paul, such as Romans, 1, 2 Corinthians, and Galatians ? 

‘(2) How is it that he does not mention the precise and 
direct testimony in Theophilus to the Gospel of St. John, 
while he does mention a reference in this same author to the 
Apocalypse ? 


‘ And this explanation of the silence of Eusebius, while it 
is demanded by his own language and practice, alone accords 
with the known facts relating to the reception of the Fourth 
Gospel in the second century.’ ὃ 


5 Essays, ut supra, pp. 51-2. 


Syriac ver- 
sion of 
Eusebius. 


Cureton. 


Dindorf. 


406 LECTURE VIL. 


Nor is it by silence only that Eusebius is speak- 
ing, and about to speak, afresh to this generation. 
Up to the year 1855 the great work of the Father of 
Church History was known to us from Greek sources 
only, and of the available Greek MSS. none are earlier 
than the tenth century. 

But Canon Cureton published in that year a selec- 
tion of Syriac documents, and gave an extract with 
a translation of a Syriac version of the Ecclesiastical 
History by Eusebius.* In 1871 Dr. Dindorf published 
in his own edition of Eusebius the following note 
from Canon Cureton :— 


I am occupied in preparing an edition of the ancient 
Syriac version of the Kcclesiastical History of Eusebius. I 
have two manuscripts of it at my disposal. One, most kindly 
lent to me by His Majesty the Tzar, from the Imperial public 
library at S. Petersburg, dated a.p. 462. This volume con- 
tains, with certain lacune, books 1.--ἶν. and viii.—x. Of books 
v. and vu. only small portions remain, and book vi. is wholly 
wanting. ‘The Nitrian manuscript, preserved in the British 
Museum, which I am now collating with my copy of the 
Petersburg manuscript, is of somewhat later date (the date 
has been erased and is no longer legible), but very carefully 
written. It contains books i.—v. almost complete. ὅ 


Professor Dindorf gives a specimen of the version 
from a comparison of the texts of the British Museum 
and the Imperial Library at ὃ. Petersburg. This he 
was enabled to do through the kindness of Professor 


William Wright and Professor Ludolph Krehl. 


4 Spicilegium Syriacum, 1855, 5 Eusebius, ed. Dindorf, tom. 
pp. 56-60. iv. Pref. pp. vi sq. 


LECTURE VIL. 407 


In 1880, Professor Adalbert Merx announced, at 
the meeting of the Oriental Congress at Florence, that 
Professor Wright had prepared an edition of this 
version, which he hoped to publish together with an 
English translation and notes by Dr. Field, who is 
known to us all as the learned editor of the Hexapla 
of Origen.° 

But Dr. Merx heard the first news of this Syriac 
MS. when he was at Venice, learning Armenian ; 
and his friend and tutor, P. Arsenius Sukrean, in- 
formed him that an Armenian version of Eusebius had 
been printed the year before. He was convinced, and 
gives reasons which are, I think, fully convincing, that 
the Armenian is not made from the original in Greek 
but from the Syriac, and that it contains the sections 
which are wanting in the Syriac. The Armenian has 
also independent notes of time which confirm the 
early date assigned to the Syriac version. This 
throws us back then far into the fourth century, 
and makes it probable that not long after the work 
of Eusebius became known in Greek, it was known 
also in Syriac, and thus made accessible to both 
Eastern and Western Christendom. This view is 
confirmed by the practice of Cyril of Alexandria, 
who at the beginning of the fifth century published 
his work On the Faith in both Greek and Syriac.‘ 

You will see of what immeasurable importance 


5 Atti del iv. Congresso imterna- 7 Wright, Catalogue of Syriac 
zionale degli Orientalisti. Firenze, MSS. im the British Museum, 
1880, vol. i. pp. 199-214. Di-div; pi (19: 


Armenian 
version. 


Merx. 


Syriac 
Apology. 


408 LECTURE VII. 


this discovery may prove to be. It may reveal to us, 
with a certainty which has not been attainable in 
modern times, the history of the Church during the 
first three centuries ; and it is already known that it 
fully confirms the history on which we have been 
hitherto dependent. Cureton and Wright and Field 
and Bishop Lightfoot are no longer with us in bodily 
presence; but it is to be hoped that the work pre- 
pared, now some years ago, may be forthcoming 
without much delay. Professor Merx writes to me 
on the last day of last year with reference to the 
Armenian version :— 

I hope I will get assistance to complete the whole, which 
is difficult for me as it is to be printed in English, so that 


without the correcting eye of an Englishman it cannot be 
accomplished. 


I have referred in an earlier lecture® to an 
Apology addressed to the Emperor Antoninus, which 
was also given to us from the same Collection of 
Nitrian MSS. by Canon Cureton in 1855.2 Many 
critics of weight regard this Apology as really the 
work of Melito, and some would identify it with the 
Apology of which we have fragments in Eusebius.’ 
The matter is not one of sufficient importance to 
justify our further discussion of it. There seems to 
me good ground for not ascribing it to Melito him- 
self, and equally good ground for believing that it 
dates from his period. It is interesting as showing 


8 Lecture I. p. 35. ® Spicilegiwm, ut swpra, pp. 41-56. 
1 Hist. Eccl. iv, 26. 


LECTURE VIL. | A409 


the kind of evidence which has been lying all around 
us though we knew it not, and the wide field which 
is open for the investigation of scholars. 


But the time has now arrived when this division of 
our subject must be brought to a conclusion. I have 
endeavoured in the three lectures of the Lent term 
to set before you ‘the judgment of centuries’ upon 
the Fourth Gospel, and have in the four lectures of 
this term tried to examine the criticism of ‘our age.’ 
I am well aware how fragmentary the treatment of so 
wide a subject has necessarily been, but I have de- 
sired to give every important witness some hearing, 
and especially every witness who has anything to 
adduce against the Johannine authorship of the 
Fourth Gospel. Your patient endurance will con- 
firm my conviction that while some names have been 
passed over, others might have been omitted without 
serious loss. 

And, now, what does it all prove? Where is 
this destructive criticism, which is, by a definite and 
compact body of measured proof, to establish the fact 
that the convictions of all previous ages are a series 
of mistakes, and that ‘ our age has cancelled the judg- 
ment of centuries’? Evanson, Bretschneider, Strauss, 
Baur, Hilgenfeld, Volkmar, Renan, Scholten, Keim, 
Davidson, and the rest—where is their collective 
wisdom, where the fixed results of their investiga- 
tions? By what laws of evidence is a case to be 
supported in which almost every witness contradicts 


Conclu- 
sion. 


No body 
of nega- 
tive cri- 
ticism 
which is 
not self- 
destruc- 
tive. 


The 
positive 
is to the 
negative 
criticism 
ast=n, 


410 LECTURE VII. 


the witness on his own side who has gone before, and 
then contradicts himself ? What is the value of that 
man’s evidence who tells us plainly, first, that he is 
certain, then that he is doubtful, then that he is 
doubtful about his doubts, then that he is certain 
as to his doubts about his doubts—but thinks his 
opinion may yet change? What verification is pos- 
sible for theories which assure us now that the Gospel 
is the growth of unconscious myth, now the result 
of deliberate design ; now that its roots are meta- 
physical, now that they are mystical; now that the 
work is clearly composite, now that it is absolutely 
one; now that the discourses are trustworthy, but 
not the history ; now that the history is trustworthy, 
but not the discourses ; now that the author is clearly 
a Jew, now that he is certainly a Greek ; now that 
he is a Syrian, now that he is an Alexandrian ; now 
that the whole teaching bears the impress of Philo, 
now that it is permeated by the Gnosticism of Basi- 
lides ? What dependence can be placed upon inves- 
tigations which assure us with equal confidence that 
the gospel was written in A.D. 180, 170, 160, 150, 
140, 120, 110, or even far back into the first century? 

If all these clashing, contradicting, self-destroying, 
each-other-cancelling theories of ‘our age’ are now 
placed beside the calm and deliberate judgment of the 
second and all succeeding centuries, and with the posi- 
tive judgment and knowledge of our own day, what 
is the effect ? Is it less than to divide positive unity 
by a positive zero, and is not the result a positive 


LECTURE VII. 411 


infinity ? As I am speaking these words, a sentence 
from Strauss comes back to my thoughts, and I know 
not how better to express my meaning—it will not be 
thought that Strauss applied his words in quite the 
same sense :— 


The subjective criticism of the individual is like a water- 
pipe which any urchin can stop up for a time. Criticism, 
when in the course of centuries it accumulates objectively, 
rushes along like a roaring river, against which dams and 
dykes are powerless.” 


I will not detain you by asking what answer the 
negative criticism of this century would give to 
the legitimate demand that it should find an author 
who would meet the complex conditions of the 
Johannine problem ;* though, as we have seen,* the 
‘judgment of centuries’ could not be cancelled by 
any body of destructive criticism even if it existed. 
The answers are valueless, as the guesses about 
Nathaniel or Apollos, or they are worse than value- 
less. Is it not almost incredible that a man, know- 
ing anything of the Origins of Christianity, should 
have thought of Cerinthus as the author of the 
Fourth Gospel? But this suggestion comes from 
M. Renan.’ [5 it not more than incredible that any 


2 ‘Die subjective Kritik des 
Einzelnen ist ein Brunnenrohr, 
das jeder Knabe eine Weile zu- 
halten kann: die Kritik, wie sie 
im Laufe der Jahrhunderte sich 
objectiv vollzieht, stiirzt als ein 
brausender Strom heraus, gegen 
den alle Schleussen und Damme 


nichts vermégen.’ Die christliche 
Glaubenslehre, 1840, i. Preface, 
pix: 

5. Cf. the opinion of Dr. Mar- 
tineau, quoted in Lecture V. p. 
287. 

4 Cf. Lecture IV. p. 173. 

> “Tout est possible ἃ ces 


Sugges- 
tions of 
author 
other than 
S. John 
valueless. 


The river 
of the past 
strength- 
ened in 


412 LECTURE VII. 

one who had ever read a chapter of this Gospel 
should have suggested that the disciple whom Jesus 
loved, the original author of the Gospel, was Judas 
Iscariot? But this is the distinction of Herr Ludwig 
Noack, who published four erudite but most repulsive 
volumes on the Life of Jesus, in 1870-71.° These 
are not dams or dykes—they are mere drains, which 
the roaring river carries away without leaving a mark 


behind. 


Meanwhile, the nineteenth century has been like 


those which have preceded it. 


On every hand fresh 


fountains of deeper knowledge, fresh streams of posi- 
tive criticism, have contributed to the volume of the 


époques ténébreuses ; et, si VE- 
glise, en vénérant le quatriéme 
Evangile comme l’ceuvre de Jean, 
est dupe de celui qu’elle regarde 
comme un de ses plus dangereux 
ennemis, cela n’est pas en somme 
plus étrange que tant d’autres 
malentendus qui composent la 
trame de Vhistoire religieuse de 
Vhumanité.’ L’Eglise Chrétienne, 
1879, p. 54. Cf. ‘Jean, ἃ ce qu'il 
parait, repoussait les doctrines de 
Cérinthe avec colére.’? Les Evan- 
giles, 1877, p. 420. 

6 Aus der Jordanwiege nach 
Golgatha. Darstellung der Ge- 
schichte Jesu auf Grund freier 
geschichtlicher Untersuchungen 
iiber das Evangelium wnd die Evan- 
gelien. Mannheim, 1870-71. I 
cannot advise anyone to ex- 
perience the pain of referring to 
a work which reaches a deeper 
depth than any which I have else- 


where known with any pretension 
to scholarship or thought. The 
Fourth Gospel is treated in vol. 
11. pp. 37-236. The following 
passage will sufticiently show the 
writer’s view of the authorship : 
‘Wir erkennen also im BusEN- 
JUNGER des vierten Evange- 
liums den J upas THAaDDAUS 
oder LEBBAUS der synopti- 
schen Ueberlieferung und finden 
diesen nicht verschieden von dem 
andern Judas, der in letzterer als 
Verrither bezeichnet’ . . . Ibed. 
p. 190. After this, nothing will 
cause surprise, or it would seem 
startling to learn that Golgotha 
is not in Jerusalem but in Sa- 
maria at Kefer Zud,and that Gab- 
batta = Gennatha, with much more 
of the same nature and the same 
value. Ibid. iv. pp. 78 and 141- 
143. 


LECTURE VII: 413 


flood ; and the river of the past rolls on in the present 
fuller, stronger, more irresistible than it has ever been 
before. 


And now I trust that the technicalities which 
have wearied us too long are ended. In the next 
and concluding lecture, I hope to deal for the most 
part with the influence which modern thought should 
have on our conceptions of the spiritual realities of 


the Fourth Gospel. 


the pre- 
sent. 


“art 


j 7 
a Weary. 


rel 


a: 3 ἐμὴν ΟΝ ΟΝ Ἂ Ἢ a ie 
ae: % he ἌΝ ; Εν. ᾿ ὧν ia ee 
iy ἢ γ᾽. ᾽ ᾿ ' Md 
5 pay A ? - 7 Ne Pay Ae 
a ae ee 
᾿ Mae an, ᾿ 
Ve 


Ἧ iy 


LECT ORE VEE 


INTERPRETATION OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 


THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION 


AAAA KAI EAN ΦΗΣ AEIZON MOI TON OEON SOY, ΚΑΓῺ Ol 
EINOIMI AN AEIZON MOI TON ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΝ ΣΟΥ KATQ ΣΟῚ AEIEN 
TON @EON MOT. . . . . . . 

ΠΑΝΤΕῈΣ MEN ΓᾺΡ ΕΧΟΥ͂ΣΙ ΤΟΥΣ ΟΦΘΑΛΜΟΥ͂Σ, AAAA ENIOI ΥΠ0Ο- 
ΚΕΧΥΜΕΝΟΥ͂Σ KAI ΜῊ ΒΛΕΠΟΝΤΑΣ TO ΦΩ͂Σ TOY HAIOY. ΚΑΙ OT 
ΠΑΡΑ TO ΜΗ ΒΛΕΠΕΙΝ TOTS ΤΥΦΛΟΥΣ HAH KAI OTK ἘΣΤΙΝ TO ΦΩ͂Σ 
ΤΟΥ HAIOY ΦΑΙΝΟΝ, AAAA EAYTOTS AITIAZ@NSZAN ΟἹ ΤΥΦΛΟΙ KAI 


TOTS ἙΑΥΤΩ͂Ν OFOAAMOTS. 
Theophilus. 


LECTURE VIII. 


Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, 
which are not written in this book: 

but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, 
the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.— 
John xx. 30, 31. 


Ir you have been good enough to follow the argu- 
ments which I have endeavoured to place before 
you in the earlier lectures of this course, you will, I 
believe, admit that sufficient reason has been shown 
for accepting the judgment of ages expressed now 
by tradition, now by the religious consciousness of the 
community or of the individual; here by decree of 
council, or statement of a Father of the Church, there 
by the inner light, or the canons of historical and 
literary criticism. You will, I believe, also admit 
that sufficient reason has been shown for refusing 
to accept the statement that any consistent body of 
negative criticism has arisen in our own age which 
can cancel that judgment ; and for believing that in 
this century, as in the Christian centuries which 
have preceded it, there has been an accumulating 
mass of evidence in favour of the genuineness of 
the writing which we are justified in calling, without 
trace of uncertainty in our voice, ‘The Gospel ac- 
cording to 8. John.’ I shall also venture to hope, 
EE 


Results 
from 
earlier 
lectures. 


The 
Fourth 
Gospel is 
‘accord- 
ing to ὃ. 
John.’ 


Inspira- 
tion is of 
the es- 
sence, not 
of the 
form. 


418 LECTURE VIII. 


though I confess my confidence is here less sure, 
that no one will be unprepared to admit that, when 
the writer of this Gospel claims that his Master 
promised His abiding spiritual presence to the 
Church and promised the inspiration of the Comforter 
in these words,— 

But the Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the 


Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, 
and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you, ! 


the promise was made and fulfilled for ‘ all things,’ for 
the substance, that is, and not for the mere form of 
the revelation of Christ Himself. In other words, it 
will, I trust, be admitted that even in this most 
spiritual Gospel, it is the matter, that is to say the 
eternal reality, and not the form, that is to say the tem- 
poral expression of the reality ; the essence of the truth 
and not the accident of language, construction, word ; 
the spirit which quickeneth, and not the letter which 
killeth ;—that it is the matter, essence, spirit, not 
the form, accident, letter, which is inspired. It is 
the Gospel of Jesus Christ ; it is the Gospel accord- 
ing to S..John. The treasure is divine; the vessel 
is earthen. [I am making no claim on behalf of this 
writing, or any other writing of the New Testament, 
that it is more than the earthen vessel in which the 
treasure of inspired truth is contained. The ‘ Word 
of God’ is contained in, but 15 not identical with, 
the written or spoken word of even inspired men. 
The necessity of human thought which seeks some 


1 John xiv. 26. 


LECTURE VIII. 419 


visible form of the Divine, and is rightly satisfied in 
the Incarnation and spiritualized in the Ascension, 
has expressed itself when these doctrines have not 
been known or have not been fully grasped, as in 
idolatry, in human infallibility, in Mariolatry, in sen- 
suous modes of worship, so also in a bibliolatry which 
claims for the material form the divinity which be- 
longs only to the spiritual essence. But the treasure 
would not be affected, even if the vessel which con- 
tains it were cracked or marred. It should not there- 
fore seriously disturb our faith in the divine Gospel, if 
the immediate connexion of this one outward form of 
it with the Apostle John were much less certain than 
it is; nor should it greatly concern us if some or 
all of the many flaws which microscopic critics think 
that they have found in this earthen vessel were 
really to be seen there, though the more they are 
exainined by men of sober vision, the more they are 
found to be in the critic or in the instrument of his 
criticism, in the eye or in the microscope, and not 
in the object upon which they are directed. If, 
then, I make no claim for even this Gospel according 
to S. John that it is in the external form which is 
human, absolutely free from every possibility of error, 
I do claim none the less that the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ, which it contains, is divine, and that to the 
divine there can be no ascription of error. 


But this discussion of modern criticism and the 
authenticity of the Fourth Gospel has not been to 


EE? 


The vessel 
is not, the 
contents 
are, 
divine. 


This dis- 
cussion 


not an 
apologia. 


This Gos- 
pel the 

treasure of 
humanity. 


Danger of 
missing it. 


Differ- 
ences ne- 
cessary in 
revela- 
tion ; 


420 LECTURE VIII. 


me simply an academical exercise. I may be mis- 
taken, but in my own view, it is not an apologia for 
a creed. Had it been that, there could have been 
no justification either for my presence in this place, 
or. for my absence from the practical work of ‘that 
state of life unto which it hath pleased God to call me.’ 
The justification to myself at least, for venturing to 
address you, is the conviction that this writing is the 
most sacred in our worlds of time and space, that it 
contains the fullest revelation of God to man, that in 
the depth of this divine treasure there is the truest 
satisfaction of human needs, and the truest solution 
of human problems for the nineteenth century as 
for the first, for the present as for the past, for the 
future as for the present: and in the conviction that 
some men are in danger of missing the treasure, be- 
cause they claim for the outward form of it a perfec- 
tion which it has not, and in the very nature of 
things cannot have ; that other men are in danger 
of missing the treasure, because they cannot help 
seeing and attacking the weakness of this claim to 
outward perfection ; and that other men are in danger 
of missing the treasure, because amidst these loud 
and conflicting words of man they cannot hear the 
still small voice of God. 


The purpose of the present lecture, then, is to 
show that while those who accept the results of the 
previous lectures, and believe that the Fourth Gospel 
is ‘the Gospel according to ὃ. John,’ have still to 


LECTURE VIII. 491 


meet the problem of the marked differences between 
this Gospel and the Synoptics, such differences find 
their explanation in the circumstances under which 
the Gospel was written, and, so far from causing any 
difficulty, are even necessary to the fulness of the 
revelation of God in the varying conditions of man. 

Now the fourfold frame in which God has willed 
that the Church should receive the one Gospel of Jesus 
Christ ought to have made it impossible to confound 
form and substance ; and though this has not always 
been the case, any serious attempt to understand the 
Gospel according to S. John must, in the present 
state of knowledge, start from the conviction that it 
is in form widely different from that according to 5. 
Matthew, or 8. Mark, or ὃ. Luke. 

When Bretschneider supposes, for example, that if 
the Gospel of John had remained unknown through 
the eighteen earlier centuries, and at length had been 
discovered in the East, and had been published in 
our own day, we should all have admitted with one 
voice that the Jesus described by John is very 
different from the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, 
and that both representations could not be at the same 
time true, and that there would be good reason for 
our doing so ;” when M. Renan asserts that if Jesus 


2 €Si forte accidisset, ut Joannis 
evangelium per octodecim secula 
priora prorsus ignotum jacuisset, 
et nostris demum temporibus in 
Oriente repertum et in medium 
productum esset, omnes haud 
dubie uno ore confiterentur, 


Jesum a Joanne descriptum longe 
alium esse ac illum Matthei, 
Marci et Luce, nec utramque 
descriptionem simul veram esse 
posse. Nec ita sine gravi judica- 
retur ratione.’ Probabilia, 1820, 
p. 1. Cf. Lecture LV. pp. 181 sq. 


πολυμερῶς 
καὶ πολυ- 
τρόπως. 


Different 
forms of 
the one 
Gospel. 


This ex- 
pressed by 
Bret- 
schneider, 


and 
Renan. 


Baur’s 
view of a 


tendency- 


writing, 


429, LECTURE VIII. 


spake as Matthew makes him speak, he could not 
have spoken as John makes him speak,*® and sends 
us to our New Testaments, and we read the Sermon 
on the Mount side by side with the Capernaum 
discourse of the sixth chapter or the farewell of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of ὃ. John, or 
compare the parables of the one writing with the 


allegories of the other, we feel that though all this 


may be explained, too much explanation is not quite 
satisfactory, and that Dr. Bretschneider and M. Renan 
have some reason for their opinion. 


And when Dr. Baur and those who think with 
him assert that the Gospel is not history but theology, 
that from beginning to end it is marked by unity of 
purpose, that it is a Tendenz-Schrift,* and send us to 
the Gospel itself, and we analyze it, and see how 
light and darkness, love and hatred, truth and error, 
life and death, are made the sustaining ideas running 
through the whole warp and woof of the material ; 
how just those signs are chosen—they are signs, there 
is no miracle, but all becomes natural in his intense 
realization of the Divine presence—which illustrate 
these thoughts ; and how every sign is the text of a 
sermon, just as if it were chosen out of the book of 
nature, answering to the touch of nature’s God, in order 
that this very sermon should be preached from it ; we 


* ‘Si Jésus parlait comme le Jésus, ed. 1, 1863, Introduction, 
veut Matthieu, il n’a pu parler p. xxix. 
comme le veut Jean.’ Vie de 4 Cf. Lecture V. p. 294, 


LECTURE VIII. Fs By 


feel that in this respect Dr. Baur and the tendency 
school are as wholly right, as Dr. Strauss and his theory 
of myth are wholly wrong. The Fourth Gospel is a 
theological unity ; it is marked all through by distinct 
design; events are so narrated and discourses are so 
connected with them, as to carry out this design from 
beginning to end. But it did not need Dr. Baur to 
tell us this, though at the moment he did great good 
by telling it. The Gospel itself, in the words which 
formed its original ending and which supply the text 
of our present thoughts, tells us clearly—and the 
statement is repeated in hyperbolic form in the pre- 
sent ending—that it is a selection of signs, that the 
selection was made with a definite threefold purpose, 
and declares what this purpose was :— 

Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of 
the disciples, which are not written in this book: 

[And there are also many other things which Jesus did, 
the which if they should be written every one, I suppose that 
even the world itself would not contain the books that should 
be written. | 
but these are written, (1) that ye may believe that Jesus is 


the Christ, (2) the Son of God; and that (8) believing ye 
may have life in his name. 


And when Bretschneider and Strauss and Baur 
and M. Renan and others agree in the opinion that the 
whole Gospel is in form different from the Synoptics, 
and belongs to an altogether different point of view, 
they agree in stating what no intelligent and well- 
instructed reader denies. The details of supposed or 
real differences may be here passed over, because they 


and the 
Gospel 
claims to 
be so. 


Difference 
in form 
admitted. 


Details 
may be 
here 
passed 
over. 


Thediffer- 


ence as a 
whole, 


the sub- 
ject of 
inquiry. 


424 LECTURE VIII. 

take their place in a class of minor questions which 
belong to the form and not to the essence of the 
Gospel, and they have been more than sufficiently 
discussed in recent essays and commentaries. The 
chief of them may serve as an example in passing : 
The supposed discrepancies as to the Paschal Feast 
which have such a prominent place in the arguments 
of Baur, have been made the subject of minute inves- 
tigations by Dr. Schiirer,® who in this particular line 
of Judaistic lore is an acknowledged authority ; and 
he seems to establish the fact that, whatever the 
solution of the problem may be, the authorship of 
the Fourth Gospel—you will remember that he does 
not himself accept the Johannine authorship °—is in 
no way affected by it. 

But the feeling about the discourses and the 
general tone upon which Dr. Baur and M. Renan 
have from different pomts of view laid so much 
stress, 1s one which every student of the Gospel 
must more or less fully share, though he would in 
reverence shrink from their particular forms, or per-— 
haps from any forms of expressing it ; and this is of 
the essence of the matter and touches the Gospel 
itself, and therefore lies immediately in the path of our 
inquiry. 


5 De Controversiis paschalibus, 
secundo p. Chr. nat. seculo exortis, 
1809 ; Die Passastreitigkeiten des 
2. Jahrhunderts in Zeitschrift fiir 
die historische Theologie, 1870, pp. 
182-284. A good résumé of Dr. 


Schiirer’s arguments is given in 
English in Luthardt’s St. John 
the Author of the Fourth Gos- 
pel, ed. Gregory, 1875, pp. 154- 
165. 

ὁ Cf Lecture V. p. 283. 


LECTURE VIII, 


425 


I have stated but just now, and have elsewhere. 
tried to show‘ that this difference in the discourses 
admits to some extent of explanation, and is to some 


extent exaggerated.® 


Still, the more the Gospel is 


read and studied, the more the feeling asserts itself 
that we are touching an altogether different circle 
of expressions, constructions, and even modes of 


7 Cf. Bishop Ellicott’s New 
Testament Commentary for English 
Readers, vol.i. p. 557 ; Hxcwrsus 1), 
The Discourses in St. John’s Gospel. 

8 Dr. Plummer gives the fol- 
lowing interesting extract from a 
letter written by Cardinal New- 
man on July 15, 1878 :— 

‘Every one writes in his own 
style. S. John gives our Lord’s 
meaning in his own way. At 
that time the third person was 
not so commonly used in history 
as now. When a reporter gives 
one of Gladstone’s speeches in 
the newspaper, if he uses the first 
person, I understand not only the 
matter, but the style, the words, 
to be Gladstone’s : when the third, 
I consider the style, etc. to be the 
reporter’s own. But in ancient 
times this distinction was not 
made. Thucydides uses the dra- 
matic method, yet Spartan and 
Athenian speak in Thucydidean 
Greek. And so every clause of 
our Lord’s speeches in 8. John 
may be in S. John’s Greek, yet 
every clause may contain the 
matter which our Lord spoke in 
Aramaic. Again, 8. John might 
and did. select or condense (as 
being inspired for that purpose) 


the matter of our Lord’s dis- 
courses, as that with Nicodemus, 
and thereby the wording might 
be S. John’s, though the matter 
might still be our Lord’s.? Cam- 
bridge Greek Testament for Schools, 
S. John, 1882, p. 100. 

The following words of Dr. 
Mommsen will be seen to have 
also a very important bearing 
upon the subject :— 

‘The position of Asia Minor 
as occupying the first rank in the 
literary world of the imperial 
period was based on the system 
of the rhetors, or, according to 
the expression later in use, the 
sophists of this epoch—a system 
which we moderns cannot easily 
realise. The place of authorship, 
which pretty nearly ceased to 
have any significance, was taken 
by the public discourse, somewhat 
of the nature of our modern 
university and academic addresses, 
eternally producing itself anew 
and preserved only by way of ex- 
ception, once heard and talked 
of, and then for ever forgotten,’ 
Theodor Mommsen, History of 
Rome: The Provinces from Cesar 
to Diocletian. Eng. Trans. 1886, 
vol, i. p. 363. 


The key 
lies in 
transla- 
tion. 


426 LECTURE VIII. 


thought, from that with which we are familiar in 
the Synoptic Gospels; and that while the dis- 
courses differ from those of the Synoptics, they 
agree with the style of the author of the Gospel, 
as we find it in the narrative portions and in the 
First Johannine Epistle, and even with that of John 
Baptist and other persons who are introduced as 
speakers. 

This difference where we might have expected 
acreement, and agreement where we might have ex- 
pected difference, cannot be denied ; and its signific- 
ance cannot be too strongly asserted. But it would 
seem to be in entire harmony with the origin and 
purpose of the Gospel, and in the statement of these 
I shall seek to find the lessons with which to con- 
clude this course of lectures. 


The key to the Fourth Gospel lies in translation, 
or, if this term has acquired too narrow a meaning, 
transmutation, re-formation, growth; nor need we 
shrink from the true sense of the terms, develop- 
ment and evolution. I mean translation in language 
from Aramaic into Greek ; translation in time ex- 
tending over more than half a century, the writer 
passing from young manhood to mature old-age ; 
translation in place from Palestine to Ephesus ; trans- 
lation in outward moulds of thought from the sim- 
plicity of Jewish fishermen and peasants, or the ritual 
of Pharisees and priests, to the technicalities of a 
people who had formed for a century the meeting- 


LECTURE VIII. 497 


ground, and in part the union, of the philosophies of 
Hast and West. 

If we earnestly attempt to realize the life of the 
Apostle and the circumstances under which the 
Gospel was composed, it will lead us to understand 
how this process of development must have taken 
place in the inspired writer, and how absolutely 
essential it was to the purpose of his writing. 

5. John must upon any plan of his life which can 
be set forth with fair show of probability, have spent 
thirty years or more at Ephesus.? Bilingual! from 
boyhood, as Galilaans of his time and his position 
usually were, in the earlier part of life perhaps pre- 
dominantly Hebrew, he would by necessity of cir- 
cumstance become in the latter part predominantly 
Greek. His special work is to be Apostle and over- 
seer of a church which S. Paul had planted, which 


δ Le nom moderne @’Ephése, Jépoque chrétienne. On y em- 


Aia-Solouk, parait venir de ‘Ayia 
θεολόγου ou “Aytos θεόλογος.᾽ [6 . 
Reference to coins, in Wood’s 
Ephesus, 1877, pp. 182-3, which 
were struck at Ayasalouk, and 
bear the name ‘ Theologos,’ and 
go ‘far to prove that St. John’s 
church was erected at that place.’] 
‘Il est vrai qu’on prononce et qu’on 
écrit souvent Aiaslyk (Arundell, 
li. 252), ot Yon est tenté de voir 
la terminaison turque lyk. Mais 
Vorthographe correcte est Solotik 
(voir Ibn-Batoutah, ii. p. 308). 
Comparez Dara-Soluk, pres de 
Sardes. La porte qui donne 
entrée & la citadelle peut dater de 


ploya des sculptures paiennes, 
qu’on interpréta dans un sens 
chrétien.? Renan, Saint Paul, 
1869, p. 342, note 2. 

' Those who do not agree in 
his conclusions will nevertheless 
thank Dr. Alexander Roberts for 
his valuable contributions to the 
discussion of this subject. They 
are given, with a fair statement of 
the objections, in the author’s 


Realiza- 
tion of the 
Apostle’s 
position. 


Life in 
Ephesas. 


Greek the Language of Christ and .~ 


his Apostles, 1888. But cf. Dr, 
Neubauer’s learned essay On the 
Dialects spoken in Palestine in the 
time of Christ: Studia Biblica, 
1885, pp. 39-74, 


The 
Church. 


The con- 


course of /¢ 


peoples. 


The sects 
of philo- 
sophy. 


428 LECTURE ὙΠ]. 


from its very seedtime had grown up in the midst of 
such discussions as we know to have taken place, for 
instance, in the school of Tyrannus.? Apollos, the 
eloquent Alexandrian, is an example at once of the 
links which bound Ephesus to surrounding cities and 
influences, and of the’ kind of teacher who was wel- 
comed by the growing Church. ‘The Pauline Letters 
to the Ephesians, the Colossians, Timothy, are evi- 
dence in thought and word of the deeper philoso- 
phical form in which the knowledge of the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ had been imparted to them ; and of the 
dangers which had already arisen, and threatened to 
arise in more abundant measure, from the subtlety of 
thought, the tendency to uncontrolled speculation, 
the claim to Gnosis falsely so called, which charac- 
terized alike the later Greek and the Oriental culture, 
and sprung into vigorous life nowhere so fully as in 
Asia Minor and Alexandria, where these cultures 
were united. 

And outside the fold of the Church, what a seeth- 
ing mass was there of contending systems, all claim- 
ing a hearing ; many claiming, each for itself, that it 
was the one solution of the mystery of Being, of all 
things in heaven and earth and sea! What a Babel 
of confused tongues, while the speakers thought to 
raise their towers to the very heaven of heavens! 

Chrysostom tells us that ‘ All the sects of Grecian 
philosophy cultivated their science in Ephesus,’® and 


2 Acts xix. 9. Lampe, Commentarius, 1724, vol. 
5 Homil. I. wm Joannem. Cf. i. p. 51. 


LECTURE VIII. 429 


we know from the story of Justin Martyr’s conver- 
sion,* the kind of inquiries which men made there in 
the generation after John, and which men doubtless 
made in the second half of the first, as they certainly 


did in the first half of the second century.> Jews 


were there in large numbers from the first planting of | 
the Church, and the numbers multiplied after the de- | 


struction of Jerusalem.® Judeo-Christians, Ebionites, 
Essenes left their traceable marks upon the currents 
of the great stream of Asiatic thought. Syrians and 
other Easterns were there, and the special forms of 
Oriental Gnosticism, the Naasenes and the Ophites, 
which appear at the opening of the second cen- 
tury, must have had their roots deep in the first. i 
Men were there from the further East, and voices 
might have been heard telling how the mystery of 
Being had found its solution in the life and doctrine 
of Gautama whom they called the Buddha, and that 
in Nirvana was the highest good of perfect life, a 
half-true and therefore all-false pantheism which told 
men then, as it tells some men now, that the highest 


4 Cf. Lecture II. pp. 58 sq. 

5 ¢Ephese devenait pour un 
temps le centre de la chrétienté, 
Rome et Jérusalem étant, par 
suite de la violence des temps, des 
séjours presque interdits au culte 
nouveau.’ Renan, L’ Antéchrist, 
1873, p. 209. 

δ ‘Le point du monde romain 
ou la vie était alors le plus sup- 
portable pour les juifs était la 
province d’Asie. ΠῚ y avait entre 


la juiverie de Rome et celle 
d’Ephése des communications per- 
pétuelles. Ce fut de ce cdté que 
se dirigérent les fugitifs.’. .. Ibid. 
p- 206. 

7 *T?Asie Mineure était alors 
le théatre d’un étrange mouve- 
ment de philosophie syncrétique ; 
tous les germes du gnosticisme y 
existaient déjai.’? Renan, Vie de 
Jésus, 1879, p. lxxi. Cf. Lecture 
VII. pp. 372 sq. 


The East, 


430 LECTURE VIII. 


being is the ceasing to be, and that the first 
philosophy of human life is to deny the first’ postu- 
lates of individual existence, which Intellect, and 


Will, and Conscience, and Feeling, with distinct but 


united voice demand. And there from time to time 
were men who told of emanations and incarnations 
of the Divine, of which they had learned by tradition 
and from sacred books that had come down to them 
hoary with antiquity ; for to those acutest thinkers 


᾿ οὗ Aryan stock, incarnation seemed to be an actual 


and West. 


Philo. 


necessity, though to some among ourselves it has 


seemed an impossibility, of thought. And there 
were many from the West, from Egypt and Rome 
and Greece. Some of them might have been heard 
to speak of strange religious mysteries ; of animals 
sacred in their nation from the earliest records, 
because to them they represented God ; of colossal 
forms transcending all experience and suggesting the 
Infinite ; of apotheosis, that antithesis to incarnation, 
the attempt to bridge from the human side the gulf 
between man and God; of idolatry, which is at 
once the caricature of and the witness to incarna- 
tion ; of personification, by which every power of 
nature and thought of man might become a god ; 
of temples for the body, dead yet not dead; of 
transmigrations of the spirit, the same and not 
the same. And more frequently and consistently 
than any of these strange voices, might have been 
heard the teaching of the eclectic philosopher, Philo. 
Somewhat older than the Apostle, but for many 


LECTURE VIL 431 
years a contemporary, an Alexandrian Jew of high 
position and exceptional culture, steeped in Rabbinic 
lore, and yet so permeated by Plato, that men often 
said ‘ Philo is platonising, or Plato is philonising ; "ἢ | 
dissatisfied with the literal explanation of the origin 

of Being which he learnt in the synagogue, and 
seeking in the mysticisms of the far East what he 
could not find in the West, at once an effect and a 
cause of the philosophy of Alexandria and Ephesus, 
placing in the forefront of his teaching the method of 
allegory which has ever characterized the Alexan- 
drian schools, using every possible term to express 
the union of matter and spirit, grasping alike from 
Rabbis and from Stoics the doctrine of the Logos as 
the link between God and man, and yet holding it as 

it were in solution, uncertain whether there is one 
Logos ὁ or many, almost saying es _yet never fully 

saying, that the Logos is a a Af 

~~ And all this was beneath the shadow of the great The cultof 


Diana. 


temple of Diana of the Ephesians, with its hierarchy ; 


and courses of trained theologi® and exegetes—of Diana ~ 


8 The literature of Philo and In immediate relation to our 


the Logos is almost inexhaustible. 
It is a satisfaction to be able to 
refer to two quite recent English 
treatises which from different 
points of view are equally 
thoughtful and learned :—the late 
Dr. Edersheim’s article Philo in 
Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of 
Christian Biography, vol. iv. pp. 
357 sqq.; and the invaluable 
induction of Dr. Drummond in 
his Philo Judzxus, 2 vols., 1888. 


present inquiry reference may be 
made, in addition to the better 
known treatises, to Soulier, La 
Doctrine du Logos chez Philon 
d’ Alexandrie, Turin, 1876; Klas- 
sen, Die alttestament!. Weisheit τι. 
der Logos, u.s.w. 1879; and Jean 
Réville, La Doctrine du Logos 
dans le quatriéme Evangile et dans 
les euvres de Philon, 1881. 

° The theologi are named in an 
inscription from the Great Theatre 


The city. 


452 LECTURE VIII. 

who had come down from heaven and was worshipped 
as the source of life on earth ; for this temple was to 
last for yet two centuries, and images of the god- 
dess and her shrine represented the highest truth to 
men, women, children, not alone in the great city of 
Ephesus, but in all the region round about. 

The outline of daily life at Ephesus which is thus 
suggested may be easily expanded and coloured, for 
the literature! of the subject is no longer scanty. 
Tt will of course be remembered that Ephesus was 
on the one hand a great commercial centre and 
port, and on the other a luxurious Eastern city, the 
de facto capital of the province of five hundred towns.” 


of Ephesus. Cf. Wood, Dis- 
coveries at Ephesus, 1877, p. 22 
(θεολόγοι). 

1 Cf. Guhl, Ephesiaca, 1843, 
esp. cap. iii. pp. 78-140; Falkener, 
Ephesus and the Temple of Diana, 
1862; Wood, Discoveries im 
Ephesus, 1877; Renan, S. Paul, 
1869, pp. 329-349; Lewin, Life 
and Epistles of S. Paul, ed. 3, 
1875, vol. i. pp. 313-414 ; Farrar, 
Life and Work of S. Paul, vol. 11. 
pp. 1-44; De Pressensé, L’ Ancien 
Monde et le Christianisme, ed. 4, 
1889; Mommsen, History of 
Rome, ut supra, pp. 320-367 ; 
Plumptre, S. Paul in Asia Minor, 
pp. 89-138. 

2 ¢The proper metropolis of the 
province was Pergamus, the 
residence of the Attalids and the 
seat of the diet. But Ephesus, 
the de facto capital of the province, 
where the governor was obliged 


to enter on his office, and which 
boasts of this ‘ right of reception 


at landing’ on its coins ; Smyrna, | 


in constant rivalship with its 
Kphesian neighbour, and, 


in 
defiance of the legitimate right of | 
the Ephesians to primacy, naming» 


itself on coins ‘the first in great- | 


ness and _ beauty ;’ 
ancient Sardis, Cyzicus, and 
several others strove after the 
same honorary right.” Mommsen, 
History of Rome, ut swpra, vol. i. 
pp. 329 sq. 

‘ But, if the Roman merchants 


were to be found here apparently ~ 


in every large and small town, 
even at places like Ilium and 
Assus in Mysia, Prymnessus and 
Traianopolis in Phrygia, in such 
numbers that their associations 
were in the habit of taking part 
along with the town’s burgesses 
in public acts ; if in Hierapolis, in 


the very | 


------ς.-.-.---.-. 


LECTURE VIII. 


433 


Business and pleasure,? not philosophy or religion, 
brought most who came there from afar; but the 
time and the people were marked by a great up- 
heaving of the spirit of religious inquiry, and there 


the interior of Phrygia, a manu- 
facturer (ἐργαστής) caused it to 
be inscribed on his tomb that he 
had in his lifetime sailed seventy- 
two times round Cape Malea to 
Italy, and a Roman poet de- 
scribes the merchant of the capital 
who hastens to the port, in order 
not to let his business-friend from 
Cibyra, not far distant from 
Hierapolis, fall into the hands of 
rivals, there is thus opened up 
a glimpse into a stirring manu- 


facturing and mercantile life not 


merely at the seaports. Language 
also testifies to the constant in- 
tercourse with Italy ; among the 
Latin words which became cur- 
rent in Asia Minor not a few 
proceed from such intercourse, as 
indeed in Ephesus even the guild 
of the wool-weavers gives itself a 
Latin name. τῶν 
λαναρίων, Wood, Ephesus, city, 
n. 4). Mommsen, History of 
Rome, ut supra, pp. 360 sq. 

8 ‘Tl yavait dessiécles qu’ Ephése 
wétait plus une ville purement 
hellénique. Autrefois, Ephése 
avait brillé au premier rang, du 
moins pour les arts, parmi les 
cités grecques; mais ἃ diverses 
reprises, elle avait permis aux 
moeurs de |’Asie de la séduire. 
Cette ville avait toujours eu chez 
les Grecs une mauvaise réputation. 
La corruption, Vintroduction du 
luxe étaient, selon les Grecs, un 


( Συνεργασία 


effet des mceurs efféminées de 
VIonie ; or, Ephése était pour eux 
le centre et Vabrégé del’Ionie. La 
domination des Lydiens et celle 
des Perses y avaient tiré énergie 
et le patriotisme; avec Sardes, 
Ephese était le point le plusavancé 
de Vinfluence asiatique vers l’Eu- 
rope. L’importance excessive 
qu’y prit le culte d’Artémis étei- 
gnit l’esprit scientifique et favorisa 
le débordement de toutes les su- 
perstitions. C’était presque une 
ville théocratique: les fétes y 
étaient nombreuses et splendides ; 
le droit d’asile du temple peuplait 
la ville de malfaiteurs. De hon- 
teuses institutions sacerdotales 
S’y maintenaient et devaient cha- 
que jour paraitre plus dénuées 
de sens. Cette brillante patrie 
d’Héraclite, de Parrhasius, peut- 
étre d’Apelle, n’était plus qu’une 
ville de portiques, de stades, de 
gymnases, de théatres, une ville 
dune somptuosité banale, maleré 
les chefs-d’ceuvre de peinture et 
desculpture qu’elle gardaitencore. 

‘Quoique le port ett été gaté 
par la maladresse des ingénieurs 
d’Attale Philadelphe, la ville 
s’agrandissait rapidement et 
devenait le principal emporium 
de la région en dega du Taurus. 
C’était le point de débarquement 
de ce qui arrivait d’Italie et de 
Grece, une sorte d’hdtellerie ou 
d’entrepot au seuil de l’Asie. Des 


F F 


The 
Apostile’s 
work, 


434 LECTURE VIII. 


is little danger of exaggerating the force of the 
religious movements of which Ephesus was the 
centre, and of which the history in the nineteenth 
chapter of the Acts of the Apostles is an instructive 
example. 

Among the influences of such a daily life as this, 
John must have lived for more than a quarter of a 
century. He was a shepherd of the flock of Christ. 
We know something of the impression which his 
ministry left from the familiar stories of the bow,* of 
the robber,® of the encounter with Cerinthus,® of the 


populations de toute provenance 
s’y entassaient, et en faisaient 
une ville commune, ot les idées 
socialistes gagnaient le terrain 
quwavaient perdu les idées de 
patric. Le pays était d’une 
richesse extréme ; le commerce, 
immense ; mais nulle part l’esprit 
ne se montrait plus abaissé. Les 
inscriptions respirent la _ plus 
honteuse servilité, la soumission 
la plus empressée aux Romains. 
On efit dit ’universel rendez-vous 
des courtisanes et des viveurs. La 
ville regorgeait de magiciens, de 
devins, de mimes et de joueurs de 
fliite, d’eunuques, de bijoutiers, 
de marchands d’amulettes et de 
médailles, de romanciers. Le 
mot de “nouvelles éphésiennes ” 
désignait, comme celui de ‘‘ fables 
milésiennes,” un genre de littéra- 
ture, Ephése étant une des villes 
ou Von aimait le plus ἃ placer la 
scene des romans d’amour. La 
mollesse du climat, en effet, dé- 
tournait des choses sérieuses ; la 
danse et la musique restaient 


Vunique occupation ; la vie pu- 
blique dégénérait en bacchanale ; 
les bonnes études étaient délais- 
sées. Les plus’ extravagants 
miracles d’Apollonius sont censés 
se_passer ἃ Ephtse. L’Ephésien 
le plus célebre du moment ot 
nous sommes était un astrologue 
nommé Balbillus, qui eut la con- 
fiance de Néron et de Vespasien, 
et qui parait avoir été un scélérat. 
Un beau temple corinthien, dont 
les ruines se voient encore au- 
jour(’hui, s’élevait vers la méme 
époque. C’était peut-étre un 
temple dédié au pauvre Claude, 
que Néron et Agrippine venaient 
de ‘‘tirer au ciel avec un croc,” 
selon le joli mot de Gallion.’ 
Renan, ut supra, pp. 335-9. 

* Cassian, Collationes, xxiv. c. 
21, ed. Hurter, 1887, pp. 781 sq. 

> Clem. Alex., Quwis dives sal- 
vetur ? ὃ 42, ed. Klotz, tom. 111. 
pp. 353 sqq. 

6 Iren. Adv. Her. iii. 4, ed. 
Harvey, tom. li. pp. 12 sqq. 
Euseb. Hist. Eccles. ili. 28 ; iv. 14. 


LECTURE VII. 435 


message of love.’ How often must this disciple 
whom Jesus loved have told them about His life, His 
deeds, His words! How often must he have realized 
the promise that the Comforter would bring all 
things to remembrance whatsoever the Master had 
said to him! What a number of things must have 
been related in all those years, by the disciple who 
had heard most from Jesus, and from personal en- 
dowment and imparted grace had been most recep- 
tive of what he had heard! How almost natural 
becomes the exaggeration of some Ephesian church- 
men, who had listened to all this :— 

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, 
the which if they should be written every one, I suppose 
that even the world itself would not contain the books that 
should be written. 

How often must Holy Baptism which lies at the root of 
one discourse in the Gospel,* and Holy Eucharist which 
lies at the root of another ’—though the institution 
of neither sacrament is mentioned, since both were 
of old-established usage long before the Gospel was 
written—have revealed the power of sacramental grace 
and the very presence of Christ in their midst! How 
often must the chief pastor of the Church have come 
into personal contact with the doubts and difficulties 
of inquirers and catechumens, just as an English | 
bishop in Calcutta or Ceylon would talk out the | 
difficulties of some Brahman or Buddhist, in his own 


7 Jerome, in Hpist. ad Galatas, Sacred and Legendary Art, ed, 3, 
vi. 10, ed. Bened. Veron, 1737, vol. i. pp. 166 sqq. 
pp. 528 sq. Cf. Mrs. Jameson, 8 John iii. 1-22. 9 John vi. 43-59. 


Ἐπ9 


and teach- 
ing. 


436 LECTURE VIII. 


technical language, and from his own point of view! 
How often must he have given addresses which no 
Luke lived long enough to record, based it may be 
upon the Pauline model, for the Acts of the Apostles 
was probably in his hands; and have shown that He 
whom they also ignorantly groped after, was declared 
to them in the person of Jesus Christ ; that all this 
seeking after God in human form that mind of man 
may grasp Him, this Messianic hope, this apotheosis, 
this theory of incarnations, this personification, even 
this idolatry, this doctrine of Logos, this system 
of Gnosis, all this every day talk of Arche, and 
Propator, and Zoe, and Monogenes, and Anthropos, of 


. Grace and Glory and Truth, and the rest, by which 


men made successive links to reach from earth to 
heaven, that it all meant the yearning of the soul 
after God, yes, the yearning of humanity for a visible 
conception of God, and that all this was fulfilled in 
the Gospel which he declared unto them! How 
often must he have told some student of Philo, or 
some Gnostic disciple of Cerinthus in the course of 
those years :— 

In Arche was the Logos, and the Logos was face to face 
with God, yea the Logos was God. The same was in Arche 
face to face with God. All things were made by him, and 
apart from him was not anything made. That which hath 
been made was Zoé, in him; and the Zoé was the Phos of the 


Anthrépot; and the Phés is ever shining in the darkness, and 
the darkness overcame it not.! 


.Ν ᾽ > € U ‘ , e > > - 
1 EN APXH ἦν ὁλόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος Οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. 
> \ \ ͵ ‘ \ > ς λ / , ὃ ᾽ > - ἣν "δ ‘ ‘ 
ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. πάντα Ov αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς 


LECTURE VIII. 437 


Or again :— 


And the Logos became flesh and tabernacled among us, 
and we looked upon his Dowa, the Dowa of the Monogenés 
from with a Father, full of Charis and Alétheia.? 


Or again :— 


Because of his Pleréma we all received, and Charis 
growing out of Charis. For the Law was given through 
Moses, Charis and Alétheva came to be through Jesus Christ. 
No man hath ever yet seen the nature of God. Monogenés 
who is God, and who is ever in the bosom of the Father, he 
hath been the Hzegete.? 


They were living in a world of shadows; he had 
the reality of realities to declare to them. They said 
that the Word was now a creature, now an ideal 
abstraction, now a mere appearance, now limited by 
another principle in creation, now the creative idea 
of God. He said that the Word was ‘in the begin- 
ning,’ ‘was God,’ ‘became flesh,’ that ‘all things 
were made by him,’ and ‘ without him was not any- 
thing made that was made.’ They spoke of philo- 
sophies of the origin of being, and of the knowledge 
and glory of God. He spoke of one who had taber- 


> PANES: 7, > A oa a ’ > 
αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ EV. ὃ γέγονεν ἐν 
ΞΕ νει Ae 2 ae ΔΕΣΜΆ \ “- 
αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἣν τὸ φῶς 
΄ > ‘ \ ΄- ΄“΄ 
τῶν ἀνθρώπων" καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ 
σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ 
κατέλαβεν. . .. 
2 Καὶ ὁ λύγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ 
» , > ἘΠῚ δ ‘ > , 
ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα 
A , > ~ 7 ς 
τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογε- 
A Υ͂ , U 
νοῦς παρὰ πατρός, πλήρης χάριτος 
1. , = 
καὶ ἀληθείας" . .. 


8 σα » Le , > ~ 
Ore ἐκ τοῦ πληρώματος αὐτοῦ 
΄- ΄“ , > / Ν ΄ > Ἁ 
ἡμεῖς πάντες ἐλάβομεν, καὶ χάριν ἀντὶ 
χάριτος" ὅτι ὃ νόμος διὰ Μωυσέως 
ἐδόθη, ἡ χάρις καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια διὰ 
> “ a 3 4 A > ‘ 
Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐγένετο. θεὸν οὐδεὶς 
ἑώρακεν πώποτε: μονογενὴς θεὸς ὁ 
ὧν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκεῖνος 
ἐξηγήσατο. John i. 1-6, and 14, 
16-18, 


The close 
of life 


Natural 
desire for 
a record. 


The tradi- 
tional 
account of 
the origin 
of the 
Gospel. 


438 LECTURE VIIL 


nacled among men, upon whose glory he had gazed, 
who was the Only-begotten of the Father, of whose 
fulness of grace and truth he had received. They 
spake of visions of God. He declared that no man 
had seen God at any time; that the Only-begotten, 
who was in the bosom of the Father, He had been 
the Exegete, the Interpreter who had declared Him 
to man. 


And now the years of his life, already lengthened 
beyond the natural span, were drawing toaclose. He 
had written nothing of all that he had taught of the 
wondrous words and deeds of Christ. He had per- 
haps expected that the end of the dispensation would 
come before the end of life. The Gospel he had so 
often declared was well known in the Church ; but 
his spiritual children could see that the time was at 
hand when his voice would be heard no more, and 
they therefore entreat him to give them the blessing 
of a record which should remain with them, and tell 
them in his own words something of all that Jesus 
had done, and of all that Jesus had said. 


The very early tradition of the Muratorian Frag- 
ment,* which there is no sufficient reason to question 
and which is confirmed by the Alexandrian Clement, 
relates how his fellow disciples and bishops exhorted 
him ; how he bade them fast with him for three days, 
and tell each to other what revelation he might re- 


4 Tregelles, Canon Muratorianus, 1867, pp. 32 sqq.; cf. Lecture I. 
pp. 42 sqq. 


LECTURE VIII. 439 


ceive about writing the book ; how in the same night 
it was revealed to Andrew, that John should describe 
all the events in his own name, but they should all 


assist him in revising his work.? It is natural to 


imagine that more than one of his fellow disciples 


had made notes of what he had often told them ; 


it is natural to imagine that some younger hand® 
actually held the pen with which the Gospel was 
written ; it is not impossible that the style of a born 
Ephesian scribe through whose mind and hand the 
words passed, as the divine Paraclete brought all 
things to the Apostle’s remembrance, and the old 
man spake the words which were re-kindled in his 
thoughts, may have left its mark, on here and there 
a word, on here and there a form of expression that 
was thus fashioned after the exact idiom of the Ephe- 
sian speech. This is possible, perhaps probable; but 
it seems to be beyond question that the Ephesian life 
of the Apostle had been so interpenetrated by the 
atmosphere in which he lived, that he could not have 
spoken the Fourth Gospel in the last decennium of 
the first century and in Ephesus, in any other language 
than that in which we find it; and further that, if 
he had done so, he would have spoken in a language 
which could not be understood by the people, and 
would have missed the very purpose for which he 
spoke. It follows that the whole external form in 


> Cf. Clem. Alex. apud Euseb. 1840, pp. 185 sqq. 
Hist. Eccles, vi. 14; ibid. 111. 24 ; ὁ Cf. the closing scene of Bede’s 
and Liicke, Commentar, ed. 3, life, Lecture III. pp. 162 sq, 


The circle 
of disci- 
ples and 
friends. 


The work, 


if Johan- 
nine, ne- 
cessarily 
Ephesian. 


Example: 
The doc- 
trine of 
the Logos. 


440 LECTURE VIIL 


which the Gospel is clothed was Ephesian, and 
necessarily Ephesian, because it was Johannine, but 
that the whole inner reality of the truth which was 
expressed in this form was the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 
brought home to the Apostle’s mind, as he himself 
claims in his record of the promise, by the special 
guidance into all truth, and the vivifying of faculty 
to recall the teaching of Christ Himself, which is the 
work of the Holy Ghost.’ The doctrine of the Logos, 
the divine Word, for example, does not seem to have 
been, in the form at least in which it meets us in the 
Prologue of the Gospel, any part of the direct teaching 
of Jesus. It seems to have been suggested by the 
various statements about the Logos which the Plato- 
nists, the Philonists, the Ebionites, the Docetists, the 
Dualists, of Ephesus were constantly making. It meets 
these half-statements in a series of definite utterances, 
which take almost the form of a creed, all of which 
can be gathered from the teaching of Jesus as the 
Apostle knew and remembered it, and under the 
inspiring guidance of the Holy Spirit were thus 
gathered. The very term Logos, which he alone of 
the New Testament writers uses in this technical 
sense, was doubtless used by him because it was 
floating in the stream all around him. He had been 
familiar with it from the days of Galilee and the 
synagogue, for every Jewish boy who heard the 
Targums read, heard of the Mémrd da-Yéyé,° the 


7 John xiv. 26. 
; wT NOD CE. Levy, Worterbuch . . . Ταγρινηυΐην, 8.0, 


LECTURE VIII. 44] 


Word of Jehovah, and it can perhaps be proved that 
the distinctive characteristics of the Johannine doc- 
trine of the Logos are to be traced to the Targums 
rather than to Philo, though, be it remembered, Philo’s 
own conceptions had been moulded by gee 
rather than by Greek influences.? It had been from 
childhood stored up in his memory, and had grown with 
his life ; and now in old age he heard men constantly 
speaking, in strangely varying terms, of the Logos. 
Meanwhile he had been a companion of the life of 
Jesus,’ had felt His power, had seen the reality of the 
heavenly glistering through the form of the earthly, 
had witnessed the risen life, and the fulfilment of the 
promise of Pentecostal gift, had for more than fifty 
years known the power of that life in Church and 
sacrament and individual soul, as he had known it in 
himself, had seen the Logos in Apocalyptic vision ;’ 
and these men who think themselves wise and claim 
special Gnosis, and wear the garb of philosophers, are | 
for ever talking of the Zogos, without understanding 
what they say. What they dimly conceived, that he 
could plainly declare; what they yearned for, that 
he had been commissioned to give :— 

That which was from Arche, that which we have heard, 
that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, 


and our hands handled, concerning the revelation of lite-—the 
Logos which is Zée—-(and the life was manifested, and we 


9 Of. Westcott, Gospel accord- Commentary, 1879, vol. i. pp. 552 
ing to S. John, 1882, pp. xv-xviii; 566. (Watkins). 
and Excursus, Doctrine of the 1 John i. 14. 
Word in Ellicott’s New Testament 7 Rev. xix. 19. 


Transla- 
tion ex- 
plains the 
uniform 
tone of 
thought 
and ex- 
pression, 


and the 
opposing 
views of 
critics. 


449 LECTURE VIII. 


have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, 
the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was mani- 
fested unto us); that which we have seen and heard declare 
we unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship with 


The revelation of eternal life in the Incarnation ; that 
is the doctrine of the Logos. 


If, by your kind attention, I have been in any 
degree able to convey what I mean by saying that 
the key to the Fourth Gospel is to be found in trans- 
lation, it will not be necessary to offer any further ex- 
planation of the general and uniform tone of thought 
and language which admittedly permeates the Gospel 
from end to end; nor will you fail to see what is the 
truth which underlies the at first sight perplexing 
phenomena, that men of established critical eminence 
have arrived at so many, and so apparently diverse 
conclusions, with regard to its origin and scope :— 


It is Hebrew in matter and form, more so than any book 
of the New Testament. 

It is distinctly anti-Jewish, and the most widely universal 
book of the New Testament. 

It is obviously influenced by the thought and language 
of Philo, and is written by a Jew of Alexandrian culture. 

It contains Pauline elements, and is manifestly composed, 
in part at least, of Pauline materials. 

It is Gnostic, both in the main ideas and in the ex- 
pressions. 

It is Montanist, and this accounts for the doctrine of the 
Paraclete. 

* 1 John i. 1-3. 


LECTURE VIII. 443 


All these statements are true; and no one of 
them is true. The Gospel is not J ae not Hellenic, 
not Philonian, rt Alexandrian, not Pauline, not 
Gnostic, not Montanist ; but it is all these, and more 
than these. There is no one of these views which, 
if properly expressed, is not true of the Gospel, and 
is not even necessary to the conception of the Johan- 
nine authorship which I have sought to present to 
you. A Hebrew of Hebrews, the fundamental pur- 
pose of the writer is that men might believe that 
‘Jesus is the Messiah’; but he is a Hebrew with 
whom the forms of Judaism have passed away. The 
temple has been overthrown; Jerusalem has been 
destroyed. He gazes not upon the Sea of Galilee, but 
upon the Mediterranean, which washes the shores of 
the civilized world, and upon the great avenues 
to the East. He looks not upon fishermen’s boats, 
but-;1pon the ships of commerce and traffic, which 
link peoples whom the sea does but seem to divide. 
The Church has gathered in of all nations, and_his 
Judaism has widened into universalism, because he 
has seen that it was, in the providence of God, a pre- 
paration for a religion of humanity ; and the second 
fundamental purpose of the Gospel is therefore that 
men might believe that Jesus is ‘the Sonof God.’ It 
must have had elements of Philo, though they are 


fewer than men have sometimes thought, for Ephesus 


was as Philonian as Alexandria was.. It must have 
had elements of Paul, for John is the Apostle of the 
completion, as Paul was the Apostle of the founda- 


No human 


view ex- 


presses the 


fulness of 


the divine. 


¥ 
; 4 


Transla- 
tion a 
problem 
for all 
time. 


444 LECTURE VIII. 


tion. It must have had forms parallel to those of 
Gnostic and Docetic thought, for it was to meet these 
strivings after truth. Its doctrine of the Paraclete 
gave rise, it may be, to the later perversions of Mon- 
tanism, but was of especial necessity for a people who 
talked of Paracletes* without knowing what meaning 
really underlay the words, and for a church some of 
whom had not, up to ὃ. Paul’s visit, even heard that 
there was a Holy Ghost. The man who will think 
out what ὃ. John was, and what Ephesus was, and 
what the Gospel according to ὃ. John must have 
been, will find that it must have contained all these 
and many other elements ; and if he will analyze it, 
he will find that it does contain them. Lach critic 
has been proud of his own prism, and by means of it 
has seen his own human parti-coloured light ; while 
all taken together prove that the Gospel is more than 
human, and that in the harmony of all the varied 
hues of finite knowledge is the clear light of in- 
finite and eternal truth. 


And this process of translation is necessary not 
only for the first century and for Ephesus ; but for 
every time and for every place. ‘The problem has 
presented itself, and has been now more now less fully 
met—more fully as Theology has exercised, less fully 
as she has abdicated her sovereignty of the sciences 


4 Of. Excursus on The mean- mentary, 1879, pp. 561 sqq. (Wat- 
ing of the word Paraclete ἴθ kins). 
Ellicott’s New Testament Com- 5 Acts xix. 2. 


LECTURE VIII. 445 


—in the whole history of the Church. Let me ask 
you to inquire how far it is the problem of the nine- 
teenth century, the problem of the England of to-day, 
the England which has formed so much of the world 
in the past, and is making still more in the present ; 
the problem of the Oxford of to-day, the Oxford 
which has made so much of the England of the past, 
and is, God blessing her, to make still more of the 
England of the future. 

We look not upon the Lake of Galilee, nor yet 
upon the land-locked Mediterranean, but upon mighty 
oceans, whose waters are the highways of continents. 
Our ports are filled, not with the boats of fishermen, 
or the small vessels of an inland sea, but with huge 
and swift merchant ships of peace, and armed ships of 
war, whose circuit is the known world. Steam and 
electricity have spanned the oceans, and we speak 
across the great deeps. The printing-press has made 
it possible, and education has made it actual, that the 
progress of knowledge should be no longer the privi- 
lege of a caste, but the common heritage of the brother- 
hood of man. We are members of an empire upon 
which the sun never sets. Queen Victoria has reigned 
for more than fifty years over dominions compared with 
which the empires of the East, of Greece, of Rome, of 
Alexander, of Augustus, of Charlemagne, of Napoleon, 
sink into insignificance. The Queen of England and 
Empress of India reigns to-day over more Moham- 
medan subjects than the Sultan does. She has prob- 
ably more Buddhists among her peoples than she has 


The 
problem of 
to-day. 


446 LECTURE VIII. 


Christians, though the proportion is quickly changing.® 
The English language has extended its sway more 
rapidly even than the English rule ; it is taught now 
in every country in the world ; and a careful autho- 
rity has estimated that at its present rate of progress 
This 


spread of empire, this binding into one great nation- 


it will within a century become universal. 


ality of so many diverse peoples, with diverse his- 
tories, languages, customs, religions, gods ; this unity 
of language, which is fast making it possible for 
the English press to speak to all humanity : 7 this 
union for the first time in the history of the world, of 
the rule of empire, and of the sway of speech, of first- 
century Rome and first-century Greece, under one 
sceptre ; this new world across the Atlantic, the West 
which is daughter and friend of the East, happily her 
rival only in the arts and blessings of peace, in no 
sphere more happily or more successfully her rival 
than in those studies which have for their immediate 
aim the knowledge of the Word of God and the 
history of His Church upon earth ; these vast terri- 
tories won for the sciences, the arts, the manufactures ; 


6 Cf. Monier Williams, Budd- Dictionary of Statistics, 1886, p. 


hism, 1889, pp. xiv to xviil. 

7 In 1801, out of every 1,000 
persons on the globe, 129 are esti- 
mated to have been English- 
speaking. In 1883 the proportion 
was 271 to the 1,000. Every 
other European language shows 
a marked decrease in the ratio, 
except German, which has been 
about stationary. Cf. Mulhall’s 


275. 

‘That the future of civilisa- 
tion is in the hands of the English- 
speaking race is aS sure as any 
unaccomplished fact can be.’ See 
interesting calculation by Mr. 
Arnold-Forster, from which this 
result is deduced, in the Nine- 
teenth Century, Sept. 1883, vol. 
xiv. pp. 386-401. 


LECTURE VIII. 447 


this accumulation of immense wealth in the hands of 
the few ; this spread of political power among the 
many ; these social and political questions which are 
everywhere pressing for solution at our hands; above 
all, this seething medley of all religions and no 
religions—Platonists, and Philonians, and Gnostics, 
and Docetists, teachers from the far East, teachers 
from the far West, spiritualism—that credulity of the 
incredulous—magical arts, luxury, voluptuousness, 
sensuousness—what does it all mean ? 

Are we living in a nineteenth-century Ephesus ? 
Have we present with us every element of the Ephesus 
of the first century on a wider, grander scale ? But 
where are the 5. Paul and the S. John, the translators 
of truthintotruth? Are they with us in very deed in 
the Church they helped to found, and in the Gospel 
they preached? Are their very writings read in the 
Church to-day? We answer‘ Yes ;’ but the answer 
is half-hearted, for we must confess that these writ- 
ings are not being fully translated and read in the 
thought and language of the nineteenth century, and 
that men often cannot understand them, and there- 
fore think that they belong to another sphere of being 
and have nothing to do with their own real life. 

And are not the Universities— Universitates, what 
a wide width of meaning in the very name!—the 
foundations of our spiritual ancestry to promote 
‘true religion and sound learning,’ the very eyes 
of this our great empire—eyes of the intellect, eyes 
of the spirit—to look forth on the vast world which 


A nine- 
teenth- 
century 
Ephesus, 


Relation 
of Univer- 
sities to 
this 
problem. 


leaders. 


448 LECTURE VII. 


lies before them, and then to look within into the 
treasury of God richly stored with all the fulness of 
truth which has been gathered in all these centuries 
of life? And are they not to utter the voice, the word, 
spoken, written, printed, which shall in our English 
language, the chosen vessel of God, proclaim the 
truth of heaven to meet the wants of man? Have 
not men who live physically and mentally on the 
circumference of this great circle of English and 
English-speaking humanity, the right to look to its 
centres for the illumination which they have re- 
ceived from God? Have we not the right to ask 
that our spiritual guides, the Bishops and Fathers of 
our Church, and our intellectual guides, the Patres 
Conscripti of our commonwealth of thought, will lead 
us, as they alone have the right to lead, as they alone 
have the power to lead? 

There is a vast army ready to a man to follow, 
even to the death, if they could be but quite certain 
that the voice which cries ‘ Forward’ is a voice 
which has the right to speak, and does speak, in the 
name of eternal truth, in the name of the eternal 
God! Is it answered, ‘ That voice can only come 


from the Truth, who is the very Word of God. He is 


’ the Interpreter of the Father. Other foundation can 


no man lay than that is laid’? Yes! a thousand 
times yes! But the church at Ephesus was not 
only a foundation, but a growth. Not more diverse 
were the materials of metal, wood, stone, jewels ; 
nor more varied the forms in each component part of 


LECTURE VIL 449 


the great whole which grew together and made the 
temple of Ephesus the glory of Asia. This infinite 
variety serving to form unity in the master-builder’s 
hands, this growth to completeness, this sacred shrine 
of the deity, is made, when every part is thought 
of as endowed with life, to represent to us the Church 
of the living God. The members of it are spoken 
of as ‘fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the 
household of God, being built upon the foundation of 
the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being 
the chief corner stone ; in whom each several build- 
ing, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple 
in the Lord.’* ‘Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, 
to-day, yea, and forever.’ ‘God is not the God of the 
dead, but of the living.’ The Gospel according to S$. 
John was not the less divine, because it was the Gospel 
of the close of the first century, and not the Gospel 
of the earlier decades. It was not the less divine 
because it met the philosophical needs of men of its 
own day, and did not speak in the tones of another 
period. It was not the less divine, because it was the 
Gospel of Ephesus, which Ephesians needed ; and not 
the Gospel of Galilee, which they did not need, which 
they could not have understood, and for which they 
would not have cared. Is it answered: ‘ But S. John 
was specially inspired for this special work, and 
although we believe in the presence of Christ and of 
the Holy Spirit in the Church, we cannot add to the 
sum of Apostolic and divine truth’? Quite so; but 
8 Ephes. ii. 19-21. 
GG 


Difficulty 
of the 
task. 


450 LECTURE VIII. 


this very truth, which is God’s fullest revelation to 
the world, is in a language—I do not mean of word, 
but of thought—which is to thousands, millions of 
our brother men, either dead because they cannot un- 
derstand it, or rejected because it seems to be opposed 
to other forms of thought which they believe to be 
true. It is not addition, it is not diminution, it is 
not substitution, it is not change of essence, it is 
translation, for which the plea is made. 

And this translation of thought is one of the 
hardest tasks of life. It requires a full and intimate 
knowledge of the system from which, and of the sys- 
tem into which, you would translate. And yet men 
sometimes attempt the task with a knowledge of 
only one, or it may be of neither, system. And so 
we have gospels for England, gospels for the nine- 
teenth century, which may have much of the Gospel 
and very little of the nineteenth century, or may have 
much of the nineteenth century and very little of the 
Gospel ; or may, as is too often the case, have very 
little of the Gospel or of the nineteenth century. And 
yet these are taken to represent our teaching and our 
faith. Men who might have special gifts for such a 
task shrink from it, for they see more clearly than 
others how full it is of danger and of difficulty. It 
is not for them, they think: it is for their leaders. 
And if here and there a rarely gifted soul has felt 
called of God to make the attempt, his work has 
had the stamp of no authority. Our own Church 
and universities have now no formal imprimatur for 


LECTURE VIII. 45] 


the works of their individual sons ; but they often 
have a very real Index prohibitorum, or at least 
expurgandorum. A translation must necessarily differ 
in form from the original ; how easy it is to think, 
and how much easier to say without thinking, that 
the substance differs too! How easy to start the 
suspicion of heresy, to let loose the not always 
chained but always blind passions of party-feeling 
and prejudice, to sully, by dragging it into the arena 
of strife, even the pure robe of truth ! 

These are problems, the solution of which the 
Church and the age would alike accept without demur 
from those who are their acknowledged representa- 
tives, but no one else can hope to solve them. These 
are difficulties in which none but leaders can lead; for 
only leaders can build the present upon the great past, 
only leaders can mould the present into a greater 
future. The popular opinion which is born of the 
present is to be formed, and not to be obeyed; but 
only leaders can form it. Never I believe were there 
more apparent difficulties, never fewer real ones than 
to-day. Never were there so many influences for 
right and truth and God, running parallel to each 
other, sometimes crossing and thwarting each other, 
always and quite unnecessarily falling short of the 
united force of a great army banded together for the 
service of the Lord of Hosts. 


I do not speak without consciousness of, or with- 
out thankfulness for, much that has been, that is being 


α6 2 


Only 
leaders 
can lead, 


Leaders 
must lead. 


452 LECTURE VIII. 


done. I come from a diocese to which Oxford has 
given a Butler and a Van Mildert, to which Cam- 
bridge has given a Lightfoot and a Westcott. These 
are but examples. England, India, the Colonies, 
America, the Mission field could tell of many like 
instances, and of the responsive touch of humanity 
to every gift of higher spirit, and thought, and life. 
The English-speaking world is not unmindful, for ex- 
ample, of the boon of a translated bible, nor of many 
individual efforts to interpret it; but the great 
problem of translation, in all the width of its mean- 
ing, still lies before us at every step, and there are 
to-day large numbers of earnest inquirers after truth 
outside the building of the Catholic Church, which 
should be the teacher of all truth, because they are 
groaning beneath ‘heavy burdens, and grievous to be 
borne’; while they who ‘sit in Moses’ seat’ them- 
selves ‘ will not move them with one of their fingers.’ 
These difficulties are but spectres which haunt the 
darkness of ignorance, and would vanish before the 
light of knowledge. And is not God saying in 
the presence of this intellectual darkness and moral 
chaos, ‘ Let there be light’? Is not the Church, the 
body of the Incarnate Logos, to be the Light shining 
in darkness ? Dominus illuminatio mea. Yes; and 
the darkness shall overcome it not. 

I have endeavoured to state a problem which 
arises out of, though it is much wider than, my sub- 
ject, and constantly confronts Christian people in their 
daily work. I have no qualification for solving it ; 


LECTURE VIII. 453 


but I have ventured to express it in the presence of 
those who have every qualification. It must become 
more and more acute. The enemy is loud in as- 
sertion. His forces are kept upon the stage, and 
they therefore seem to be much more numerous and 
powerful than they are. But many of our volunteers, 
and some of our regulars, have been disheartened by 
uncertainties, divisions, falterings in our own camp. 
The enemy will not hurt us; but we may hurt our- 
selves. Leaders must lead if the victory is to be 
won. Yes: in our philosophy and our criticism, 
our polity and our action, leaders must lead. 


And as I have no qualification for solving this 
problem, I shall make no attempt to do so; but I 
shall seek to suggest tomy younger brethren for their 
individual help, some lines on which each may for 
himself work out a course of inquiry, which will lead 
him to see that the Fourth Gospel is as truly a Gospel 
for the nineteenth century as it was for the first, and 
that in the translation of it into modern thought and 
speech lies the answer to the problems of life. 


Now what are the characteristics of the thought 
of the nineteenth century which lead men to assert 


Hints for 
younger 
hearers, 


Character- 
istics of 
present- 


that the doctrines of the past, and especially those of deenk 


the Fourth Gospel, must give way before them ? 

I am not a ‘ man of science,’ and I can only judge 
by what I read in books, or what men who know are 
good enough to tell me. But 1 am told that among 


Law and 
principle. 


454 LECTURE VIII. 


the great intellectual products of this age are what is 
called the law or principle of conservation of energy, 
the law or principle of biogenesis, the law or principle 
of the molecular constitution of matter, and, chiefest 
of all, the law or principle of evolution ;? though 
signs are not wanting, as the meetings of the 
British Association at Manchester and Newcastle- 
on-l’yne have reminded us, that even now we are 
far from finality." I have used the term ‘prin- 
ciple’ as asynonym for ‘law’ here, because | want 
the youngest among us to be free from the fallacies 
which are connected with this very ambiguous 
word. There is of course nothing of the sense of 
command or authority about it. We ought not to 
be led to think and speak of it—though men do; 
they write it with a big initial letter, and then feel it 
is something greater than themselves, a link between 
them and a higher Force or Energy, like the exons of 
the Gnostics—but we ought not to think of it as 
anything more than a convenient expression for a 
generalization from a number of separate instances. 
Such a generalization may or may not be valid; but, 
with imperfect human knowledge, it can of necessity 
have no claim to finality. It may hold for many 


years or for centuries, as some such generalizations 


9. Of. Professor Huxley’s in- 
teresting sketch of the progress of 
Science in the Reign of Queen Vic- 
toria, edited by Mr. Humphry 
Ward, 1887, vol. ii. pp. 322-387 ; 
and The Advance of Science, three 
sermons preached in Manchester 


Cathedral during the meeting of 
the British Association, in 1887. 

' Cf. Reports, 1887 and 1889, 
and Weismann, Hssays on Here- 
dity, Eng. Trans. 1889. And see 
Dawson, Modern Ideas of Evolu- 
tion, 1890. 


LECTURE VIII. 455 


have held in the course of history, and then resolve 
itself into a higher generalization. While it lasts it 
is a very convenient mode of expression ; it 1s neces- 
sary for the arrangement of, and for the progress of 
science ; but it has no binding authority, and it has 
no power to explain the admitted facts which it 
tabulates. . There are Jdols even of the museum, and 
one of them is to suppose, or to speak as though it 
were supposed, that to find for an observed pheno- 
menon its own place under an acknowledged law, is 
to explain it. If the law has a long and difficult 
name, many of us are half-frightened by it, and are 
perhaps not honest enough to admit our seeming 
ignorance, which may be much nearer to true know- 
ledge than the long name is, and we do not dare to ask 
what it means, what is there behind it, how does it 
explain the phenomena which it embraces. But if 
we ask these questions, and keep asking them until 
we get at the substance of the answers to them, we 
shall find that to express a phenomenon in the terms 
of a higher law, is not so much to explain it as to 
group it with a large number of other phenomena all 
waiting for their explanation. 

Nor should even the youngest of us be left to 
suppose that there is any such absolute agreement in 
the expression of these laws, as the assumed infalli- 
bility of some popes of modern science would have 
us think. Here, as elsewhere, contradictions of suc- 
cessive popes, or even in the course of the reign 
of the same pope, are difficult to reconcile with any 


Scientific 
laws not 
ultimate, 


The 
Fourth 
Gospel 
and our 
present 
‘laws.’ 


456 LECTURE VIII. 


claim to infallibility. As general councils have 
erred, so scientific councils have certainly erred, and 
what the primer of the school-boy will soon scorn 
to teach, has been held by the leaders of science, and 
has been expressed even in our own day from presi- 
dential chairs. No one knows so well as the truly 
scientific leader that his work is to collect, arrange, 
tabulate, re-arrange, group in higher unities, the facts 
of existence; but that of the ultimate explanation of 
them, he has not even a syllable to speak. The ad- 
mitted facts of modern science are infinitely greater 
in number than those of the ancient world; the 
classes into which they are distributed are fewer and 
more universal, but when you ask to go behind the 
colossal cases of this museum of the world, and 
inquire what it all means, you have got no answer 
which takes you further than—I am not sure you 
have any which takes you so far as—the voices which 
came from Greece, from Alexandria, and the far East, 
and which may have been heard in Ephesus eighteen 
hundred years ago. 


These laws which are said to be the chier scientific 
products of our own time, may or may not be ulti- 
mately true. They are probably—let us remove every 
qualification and suppose that they are absolutely— 
the highest expression which the world has ever re- 
ceived of the facts of existence—and let us ungrudg- 
ingly thank the patient investigators of these and 
other days. Admit that the museum of the universe 


LECTURE VII. 457 


is rightly labelled, and then, sitting down before any 
one of its vast cases, open the Fourth Gospel and 
read it. Read it just as you would read any other 
book. Read in the light of Philo and other forms 
of first-century thought, and then in the light of 
nineteenth-century thought, the first sentence ‘ In 
the beginning was the Word.’ Do you find it diffi- 
cult to translate? Shall that greatest of modern 
thinkers, Goethe, make Faust help you ? 


"Tis written: ‘In the Beginning was the Word,’ 
Here am I balked: who, now, can help afford ? 
The Word ?—impossible so high to rate it ; 
And otherwise must I translate it, 

If by the Spirit I am truly taught. 

Then thus: ‘In the Beginning was the Thought.’ 
This first line let me weigh completely, 

Lest my impatient pen proceed too fleetly. 

Is it the Thought which works, creates, indeed ? 
‘In the Beginning was the Power,’ I read. 

Yet, as I write, a warning is suggested, 

That I the sense may not have fairly tested. 
The Spirit aids me: now I see the light! 

‘In the Beginning was the Act,’ I write.” 


Or read again, ‘In him was life, and the life was 
the light of men. And the light shineth in dark- 
ness, and the darkness overcame it not.’ Or again, 
‘ He was in the world, and the world was made by 
him, and the world knew him not.’ Read these and 
other words such as these from the first-century 
Gospel, as you stand before the museums of nine- 


2 Goethe, Faust, i. scene 3, Bayard Taylor’s translation. 


No plea 
for the 
temporary 
expression 
ef theo- 
logy or 
science. 


The im- 
mensity of 
nature. 


458 LECTURE VIIL 


teenth-century science. You need not remove the 
labels from your cases. You may keep for the 
present Biogenesis, Conservation of Energy, Molecular 
Matter, Evolution; but you can engrave the truths of 
the one Eternal Law, Power, Life, Light, Loree, 
Energy, Act, Thought, Word,—Gov,—over the portals 
and upon the foundations of the universe. | 


You may find it difficult, impossible, to translate 
into modern scientific expression some of your own 
ideas as to creation. You may have to see that 
anthropomorphism is only a necessary form of a 
childish state of thought, and that God is not a 
colossal human giant, man made large and made 
divine. You may have not only to translate S. 
John, but to sacrifice your former self, unworthy of 
your higher self and unworthy of your God. 

I am not pleading that the puerilities of child- 
hood, or the temporary expressions—scientific or 
theological—of any age, should be retained. I am 
pleading for the thankful acceptance of every recog- 
nized fact of scientific truth. I am pleading that 
truth revealed in the book of the universe, cannot 
oppose truth revealed in the book of inspired human- 
ity. Collect your facts, establish your laws, write 
your labels, study your museums. Nay; they are 
too small ; study nature in the great physical world ; 
realize the awful immensity of that before which you 
stand ; multiply immensity by immensity as tele- 
scope or microscope, or a developed sense, or higher 


LECTURE VIII. 459 


trained faculty, brings other worlds within your 
grasp and 


e ° e Φ 


Are you hushed into silence and dare not speak, 
and hardly dare to hear? And if you still must 
hear, for there must be an origin of being, and 
turn to the masters of science expecting an expla- 
nation, they too are dumb. Who are the modern 
leaders of humanity whom science bids us hear in 
this darkness of impenetrable mystery ? 

Is Mr. Herbert Spencer one? He can but re- 
assert it :— 


The production of matter out of nothing is the real 
mystery... .? 


Is Professor Tyndall ? 


It [Evolution] does not solve—it does not profess to solve 
—the ultimate mystery of this universe. It leaves in fact 
that mystery untouched. For granting the nebula and its 
potential life, the question, whence came they? would still 
remain to baffle and bewilder us. At bottom, the hypothesis 
does nothing more than ‘transport the conception of life’s 
origin to an indefinitely distant past.’ ὦ 


Is Mr. Darwin ? 


The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble 
by us.° 
Is Professor Clifford ? 


My conclusion then is, that we do know, with great 
probability, of the beginning of the habitability of the earth, 


‘ 


8 First Principles, ed. 4, 1880, tion, ed. 3, 1872, p. 37. 
p. 34. > Cf. Aubrey Moore, Evolution 
4 Scientific Use of the Imagina- and Christianity, 1889, p. 7. 


Scientific 
leaders 
dumb 
before it: 


Spencer, 


Tyndall, 


Darwin, 


Clifford, 


Asa Gray. 


“ Origina- 
tion’ the 
essential 
thing. 


460 LECTURE VIII. 


about one hundred or two hundred millions of years back, but 
that of a beginning of the universe we know nothing at all.® 


Or, lastly, shall we inquire of Dr. Asa Gray, 
the American botanist, the friend and correspondent 
of Darwin, who describes his own position as— 
one who is scientifically, and in his own fashion, a Dar- 
winian, philosophically a convinced theist, and religiously an 


accepter of the ‘Creed commonly called the Nicene,’ as the 
expression of the Christian faith. 


Can his philosophy cast any ray of light on this 
abysmal gloom? 

Thus the selection and preservation, and we may say the 
eduction, of the actual forms and adaptations, may be scien- 


tifically accounted for, but not their origination. 
The origination is the essential thing.’ 


Yes : 
all our modern philosophers are without a word to 
speak in the presence of the essential thing. But 
while philosophy is dumb, you feel that there must 
be, there is, a voice which speaks. 


the origination is the essential thing. And 


The yearning 
faculties of humanity cannot be for ever yearning, 
and never satisfied ... 8 


6 Lectures and Essays, ed. 2, 
1886, p. 156. 

7 Contemporary Review, April 
1882, p. 606. 

8 ¢Those, then, who believe, as 
Christians do, that God is the 
Creator of heaven and earth, hold 
a view which, whether it is true 
or not, touches a question on 


which evolution is wholly silent ; 
so that, as Professor Huxley puts 
it, ‘‘ Evolution does not even come 
into contact with theism consider- 
ed as a philosophical doctrine.” ’ 
Aubrey Moore, Evolution and 
Christianity, 1889, p. 7. I owe 
the greater part of these refe- 
rences to Mr, Moore, and I 


LECTURE VIII. 461 


Science is dumb, but in its awful silence Faith 


hears. Where man dare not speak, God does speak. 
Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege. Open your Fourth Gospel. 
Read :— 


In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God. The same was in the begin- 
ning with God. All things were made by him; and without 
him was not anything made that hath been made. 


The only basis for the intellectual explanation 
of existence, is for the nineteenth century as it was 
for the first, the λόγος τῆς ζωῆς, the Logos who is 
Zoe, the revelation of life. ‘No man hath ever yet 
seen God: God only begotten in the bosom of the 
Father, he hath declared him.’ 


Or, again, is it characteristic of modern ethical 
science to teach that the highest good, the summum 
bonum of human life, is to be found in the develop- 
ment of every faculty of human nature; that the 
standard of right and wrong is not happiness or 
utility, but the categorical moral imperative whose 
every command must be implicitly obeyed?* It 


° “The good has come to be con- 
ceived with increasing clearness, 


thankfully embrace the oppor- 
tunity of expressing my deep 


sense of the services rendered by 
that acute thinker—taken from us, 
alas! too soon—both to theology 
and science. Cf. Science and the 
Faith, 1889, pp. 162 sqq. ; Evolu- 
tion and Christianity, 1889 ; and 
Recent Advances in Natural Science 
an their Relation to the Christian 
Faith, a paper read at the Church 
Congress at Reading in 1883. 


not as anything which one man or 
set of men can gain or enjoy to 
the exclusion of others, but as a 
spiritual activity in which all may 
partake, and in which all must 
partake, if it is to amount to a 
full realisation of the faculties of 
the human soul. And the pro- 
gress of thought in individuals, by 
which the conception of the good 


The 
Fourth 
Gospel. 


The Incar- 
nation the 
only ex- 
planation 
of exist- 
ence. 


Modern 
ethical 
science. 


The cate- 
gorical 


impera- 
tive. 


Devotion 
to duty: 


Examples. 


462 LECTURE VIII. 
might be an interesting subject for investigation to 
trace how far modern impulses and standards of 
morality are an unconscious reflection of the light of 
revelation, or how far, on principles of development, 
they are to be regarded as the outcome of truths 
which have been received by the race or individuals. 
But, confining our thoughts for the present to the 
Fourth Gospel, to the morals of the divine life which 
it portrays, or to the First Johannine Epistle, which 15 
an ethical addendum to the theological principles of 
the earlier writing, I confess it does not seem to be 
difficult to express the thoughts of the first century 
in the terms of those of the nineteenth, or rather to 
show that those of the nineteenth century are in their 
highest development based upon those of the first. 
Men who live at a distance and try to watch the 
movements of young University life, are perhaps 
struck with the practical outcome of devotion to duty, 
more deeply than with anything else. Witness the 
missions to Calcutta and Delhi, and Central Africa. 
Witness Toynbee Hall and the Oxford House. Wit- 
ness School and College missions to the neglected 


idiosyncrasy and circumstances of 
the individual may determine, to 


has thus been freed from material 
limitations, has gone along witha 


progress in social unification which 
has made it possible for men prac- 
tically to conceive a claim of all 
upon all for freedom and support 
in the pursuit of a common end. 
Thus the ideal of virtue which our 
consciences acknowledge has come 
to be the devotion of character 
and life, in whatever channels the 


a perfecting of man, which is itself 
conceived not as an external end 
to be attained by goodness, but as 
consisting in such a life of self- 
devoted activity on the part of all 
persons.’ T. H. Green, Prolego- 
mena to Ethics, edited by A. C. 
Bradley, 1883, p. 309. 


LECTURE VIIL 463 


masses of our population. Witness the evidences of 
sympathy, communion, fellowship, with the brother- 
hood of man. What is their source? A modern 
altruism?’ A nineteenth-century gospel of humanity ? 
But these are trees whose chief roots are found in 
Christian soil, and they have gladdened the earth 
with the beauty of their blossom and the bounty of 
their fruits, just as the soil has been watered by the 
showers of blessing which God has given in these 
later days to the revived Church in our midst. 
Read the Gospel of the first century. Read the 
writings of δ. John :— 

God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten 
Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but 
have eternal life. 

This is my commandment that ye love one another, even 
as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, 
that a man lay down his life for his friends. 

But whoso hath the world’s goods, and beholdeth his 
brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, 
how doth the love of God abide in him ? 

Little children, let us not love in word, neither with the 
tongue ; but in deed and truth. 

We love, because he first loved us. 

If a man say, 1 love God, and hateth his brother, he is a 
liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, 
cannot love God whom he hath not seen. 

And this commandment have we from him, that he who 
loveth God love his brother also. 


There are the principles of your highest life and 
work. There are the principles which, whether 


' Cf. Altrwismin Murray’s New and Herbert Spencer, Data of 
Dictionary of the English Language; Ethics, 1879, pp. 185 sqq. 


The true 
principle. 


Illustra- 
tions. 


The 
shadow of 
Christ. 


464 LECTURE VIII. 


you know it or not, are the spring of all your 
work, and which, whether men know it or not, the 
best life and work of our day are translating from 
the first century into the nineteenth ; and there are 
the principles which alone can make that work both 
effective and permanent. 

As I was thinking of the modern substitution of 
ideas which have sprung from Christianity, and which 
men who shrink from acknowledging Christ Himself 
are putting forward in the place of Christianity, 1 
took up a book in a house where I chanced to stay, in 
which 1 found these words :-— 

The Chaplain of a penitentiary records that among the 
most degraded of its inmates was one miserable creature. 
The Matron met her with firmness, but with a good will which 
no hardness could break down, no insolence overcome. One 
evening after prayers the Chaplain observed this poor out- 
cast stealthily kissimg the shadow of the Matron thrown by 
her candle upon the wall.? 


This was the involuntary homage of a fallen and 
wretched woman; but, Sirs, are men and women 
in the strength and vigour of intellectual and moral 
culture to be stealthily kissing the shadow of the 
humanity of Jesus Christ, cast as it is upon the uni- 
verse by the light of the effulgence of His Godhead, or 
are we to be manfully confessing Him to whom we 
owe our power to work and think?  Stealthily 
kissing a shadow ? Nay, we are to be in loving 
adoration kissing the feet of Him who was pierced 
and nailed upon the Cross for us. 

? Bishop of Derry, The Epistles of St. John, 1889, pp. 120-121. 


LECTURE VII. 465 


Is Love written as ‘charity’ or disguised as 
‘altruism’ the newly discovered principle of a brother- 
hood of humanity? Listen to ὃ. John :— 

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he 


loved us, and sent his son to be the propitiation for our 
sins. 


Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for 
us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. 


Or again, to take another example with which 
these lectures must close, it is characteristic of 
some educated thought of this century to assert 
that whether there is a personal God or not, is 
and must remain a mystery; that there cannot be 
logical proof that He exists, and that there cannot 
be logical proof that He does not exist; that the 
assertions of theism and atheism are alike beyond 
the province of the human intellect;* and that all 
we can do is to remain in the presence of an un- 
known and unknowable energy. Agnosticism, for 
it is a system with a name and leaders and disciples, 
like one of the hundreds of such theories of the past, 
has many attractions. The Greek title has some- 
thing to say for its spread among ourselves ; for, as 
was remarked long ago, many persons would proclaim 
with an air of superiority in Greek ‘I am an agnostic,’ 


3 * Of all thesenseless babble I not surpassed by the still greater 
have ever had occasion toread, absurdities of the philosophers 
the demonstrations of these phi- who try to prove that there is no 
losophers who undertake to tell God.’ Huxley, Science and Cul- 
us all about the nature of God ture, 1881, p. 241. 
would be the worst, if they were 


ΗῊΗ 


Altruism. 


Agnosti- 
cism. 


Its attrac- 
tiveness. 


Reasons. 


S. Paul’s 
8. John’s. 


466 LECTURE VII. 


who would not be equally willing to proclaim in 
Latin ‘I am an zgnoramus. Then the fact that it 
has been adopted by some who are supposed to be 
leaders of science gives it an attractiveness, a fashion, 
which has its hold upon weaker minds. It is the 
correct shade for the season, and it would not quite do 
for people who are in the circles of modern thought 
to appear in any other. And above all it is a sort of 
neutral ground. It asserts nothing positively, and 
therefore it has nothing to defend. It is the refuge 
of men of all kinds who have no opinions on the most 
vital subject possible to thought, or do not quite know 
what their opinions are, or have not the courage of 
them, or would like to postpone thinking of them. 
The special use of the term belongs to our own 
day.*/ What sort of connexion has the first century 
with this product of the present? If we study the 
teaching of 5. Paul and ὃ. John, we shall see that 
both the name and reality are much older than we 
sometimes think. §. Paul found men at Athens 
dissatisfied with their own idea of the gods, ready 
to embrace any others, and erecting an altar’ to a 
god they could not know, and Him to whose exist- 
ence their very agnosticism witnessed, he declared 
unto them. Writing to their neighbours at Corinth, 
he reminds them that ‘in the wisdom of God the 
world through its wisdom knew not God,’® and 


4 Cf. Agnostic in Murray’s New = xvii. 29. 
Dictionary, ut supra. 6 ἐν τῇ σοφίᾳ Tov θεοῦ οὐκ ἔγνω 
> εὗρον καὶ βωμὸν ἐν ᾧ ἐπεγέ.- ὁ κόσμος διὰ τῆς σοφίας τὸν θεόν, ... 
Ὕραπτο ATNQSTQ ΘΕΩ. Acts 1 Cor. i. 21. 


LECTURE VIII. 467 


this agnosticism of worldly wisdom was, it will 
be remembered, a frequent subject of his teaching. 
S. John, preaching a Gospel to gnostics and agnostics 
alike, and meeting the congeries of religious and 
philosophical seekings after God, of which Ephesus 
was, as we saw, the centre, declares in most positive 
terms this agnosticism of human intellectual powers: 
‘No man hath seen God at any time.’ But the 
agnosticism which in the negation of its own intel- 
lectual powers is strictly logical, is in the negation of 
all outside its powers as strictly illogical. $. Paul 
and §. John alike preach a Gospel not to the impo- 
tence of the human intellect, but to the strength and 
the needs of the faculty of faith :— 

For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world through 
its wisdom knew not God, it was God’s good pleasure through 
the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe.’ 


No man hath seen God at any time; God only begotten 
in the bosom of the Father, he hath been the interpreter.® 


The Fourth Gospel preaches to us, brethren, no 
system of Gnosis. ‘There is to human intellect no 
proof of axioms in any science, least of all in the 
science of the Infinite. If we could be anything more 
than intellectual agnostics, the science could not be 
of the Infinite, of the Eternal, of God. Butmen who 
profess to be logical make two tremendous leaps in 
this discussion, for which there cannot be any valid 
warrant. The first leap is from ‘I cannot under- 
stand’ to ‘It cannot be understood.’ Who will in 


TE Corsi 21. 8: John 1. 18. 
HEH? 


Intellec- 
tual ag- 
nosticism 
neces- 
sarily 
true. 


Conclu- 
sion 
without 
premises 


Examples, 


468 LECTURE VIIL 


moments of calm thought claim or allow the only 
major premise which supports this conclusion? It is 
the sort of logic which people learn very easily, but 
men do not usually admit it when made by any per- 
sons other than themselves. You may hear it any 
day :— 

‘I can’t get the answer in the book,’ said a little 
fellow in an elementary school, as he was making 
his first attempt at vulgar fractions. ‘Iam sure the 
book is wrong.’ But his certainty only amused. 

‘I do not see any not in my text,’ said a well- 
known Professor of Latin, as one of his pupils was 
construing in class. 

‘No, sir, but it won’t make sense without,’ 
replied his pupil; but neither the Professor nor the 
rest of the class were quite convinced. 

And yet this illicit process from ‘I cannot under- 
stand’ to ‘It cannot be understood’ runs through 
page after page of modern so-called religious, and 
so-called philosophical writing. If men would but 
write the J of their finite powers as small as it really 
is, and try to think of what the J of Infinite really 
means, this false reasoning at least would disappear. 

The other leap is more wonderful still, for it is 
opposed to the whole experience and practice of 
human life. It is that by which a man passes from 
‘ It cannot be understood,’ to ‘ It cannot be believed.’ 
Who will claim or admit any major premise which 
will warrant this conclusion ? What proportion of 
human life depends upon our understanding all that 


LECTURE VIII. 


469 


concerns it ? What proportion of the events of every 


day depends upon faith? 


understanding of any human being ? 
And in the complete absence of understand- 


faith ? 


What, for example, is our 


What our 


ing, are we not necessarily driven to the assertion 


of faith ? 


Is not the very intellectual paralysis of 


agnosticism in the presence of the Infinite, the neces- 


sary assertion of a faculty” higher than intellect ? 


9 ΤῈ philosophy has to explain 
what is, not what ought to be, 
there will be and can be no rest 
till we admit, what cannot be 
denied, that there is in man a 
third faculty, which I call simply 
the faculty of apprehending the 
Infinite, not only in religion, but 
in all things ; a power independent 
of sense and reason, a power in 
a certain sense contradicted by 
sense and reason, but yet a very 
real power, which has held its 
own from the beginning of the 
world, neither sense nor reason 
being able to overcome it, while 
it alone is able to overcome both 
reason and sense. 


‘Tt is difficult at present to speak 
of the human mind in any techni- 
cal language whatsoever, without 
being called to order by some 
philosopher or other. 

‘According to some, the mind is 
one and indivisible, and it is the 
subject-matter only of our con- 
sciousness which gives to the 
acts of the mind the different 
appearances of feeling, remem- 
bering, imagining, knowing, will- 


ing, or believing. According to 
others, mind, as a subject, has no 
existence whatever, and nothing 
ought to be spoken of except 
states of consciousness, some pas- 
Sive, some active, some mixed. 
I myself have been sharply taken 
to task for venturing to speak, in 
this enlightened nineteenth cen- 
tury of ours, of different faculties 
of the mind,—faculties being 
merely imaginary creations, the 
illegitimate offspring of medizeval 
scholasticism. Now I confess I 
am amused rather than frightened 
by such pedantry. Faculty, 
facultas, seems to me so good a 
word that, if it did not exist, it 
ought to be invented in order to 
express the different modes of 
action of what we may still be 
allowed to call our mind. It does 
not commit us to more than if we 
were to speak of the facilities or 
agilities of the mind, and those 
only who change the forces of 
nature into gods or demons, would 
be frightened by the faculties as 
green-eyed monsters seated in the 
dark recesses of our Self.’ Max 
Miller, Introduction to the Science 
of Religion, 1873, pp. 20, 21. 


Agnosti- 
cism is 
the asser- 
tion of 
faith. 


The 
Fourth 
Gospel 
appeals 
to the 
faculty 


of faith. 


Lessons 
for the 
indi- 
vidual. 


470 LECTURE VIII. 


It is to this faculty that the Fourth Gospel 
appeals, and here it approves itself as the Gospel 
of the nineteenth century as truly as it was that 
of the first. A Gospel to the knowledge and under- 
standing of the first century could have no word 
to speak to us to-day, for the partial knowledge of 
that time has vanished away before the more perfect 
knowledge of later days, as the partial knowledge of 
the present shall vanish away before the fuller know- 
ledge of the future. But faith abideth, and to this 
faith the Gospel speaks, then, now, always :— 


And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of 
his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these 
are written, that ye might—this is their purpose, not that 
ye might know, not that ye might understand; but—believe 
that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and that believing ye 
might have—not knowledge, not understanding, nothing 
partial, nothing temporary, but the pulsating fulness of being 
which is necessarily eternal—lfe in his name. 


This, my brethren, is the divine purpose which 
caused to be written and to be preserved unto this day 
the most sacred book in the world. Have you ever 
read it? I do not mean, Have you read or heard read 
separate chapters, or have you read portions or the 
whole, with notes and commentaries, as a subject 
for intellectual pursuit or examination? But have 
you ever read it as a whole, as a book written that 
you might believe? If not, you have missed its 
whole purpose. It is very short. It was intended 
for states of uncertainty and problems of doubt ; it 


LECTURE VIII. 471 


has met these and solved them in thousands of lives 
of greatest intellectual strength and attainment, for 
hundreds of years. Will you read it, that you too 
may fulfil the divine purpose, and ‘believe that Jesus 
is the Messiah,’ in Whom the whole past is fulfilled, 
that Jesus is ‘the Son of God,’ in Whom the whole 
present and future is contained ; the only Interpreter 
of God to man, in Whom the problems of life are 
answered and its mysteries solved ; declaring Him 
in light which dispels all darkness, in truth which 
drives away all error, in love which dies to overcome 
hatred, in life which conquers even death? Will 
you read it that you in believing may have life in 
his name? 


I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 

All questions in the earth and out of it, 

And has so far advanced thee to be wise. 

Wouldst thou unprove this to re-prove the proved ? 
In life’s mere minute, with power to use that proof, 
Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung ? 
Thou hast it; use it and forthwith, or die! 


ts a 
aes tay 


Vie 
4 } δ᾿" ae 


LN Dros 


Τὰς Seto ἢ Ὶ 


ie γον 
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INDEX. 


ABBOT 


Apspot, Ezra, 17; on Justin and 
Fourth Gospel, 75 sq.; on 
Drummond, 76 sq. ; 268, 336, 
375, 380; on the Diatessaron, 
382 

Abbott, E. A., views on Justin 
and the Fourth Gospel, 270 sq. ; 
quoted, 271 sq. 

Abbott, J. K., 359 

Abelard, 152 

Aberdeen, University of, 275, 335 

Aberklad, 385 

Achaia, 116 

Achromatism, mental, 8 sq. 

Ad Autolycum (To Autolycus). See 
Theophilus 

Addai, Doctrine of, 380 

Ad Nationes. See Tertullian 

Adventurer, The, quoted, 11 sq. 

Adversus Hereses. See Irenxus 

Adversus Marcion. See Tertullian 

Adversus Praxean. See Tertullian 

Advocate or judge? See Bampton 
Lecturer 

Aflius Aristides, 388 sq. 

/Elius Publius Julius, 39 

/®tians, 117 

Africa, 24, 48, 462 

‘ Age, Our,’ 3, 166, 169, 173, 409 
sq., 411 sq.; period comprised 
by, 5; positive additions to our 
knowledge in, 357 sq. 

Agnosticism, 12; its attractive- 
ness, 465 ; modern use of term, 
S. Paul’s, S. John’s, 466 sq. ; 
intellectual, necessarily true, 
467 ; the assertion of faith, 469 


AMPHILOCHIUS 


Agrippa Castor, 
Basilides, 100 

Albertus Magnus, 152 

Alcuin, 152 

Aleppo, 378 

Alexander, Bishop, 334 ; quoted, 
464 

Alexander, empire of, 445 

Alexandria, 33, 38, 110, 114 sq., 
121, 149, 234, 249, 261, 428, 431, 
443, 456 ; Catechetical school of, 
20. See Church ; Clement 

Alexis Aristenus, Canon of, 121 

Alford, 142, 334 

Alogi, the, one apparent exception 
to reception of Fourth Gospel, 
123, 161 ; Harnack and Zahn on, 
123 sq.; Hilgenfeld on, 124; 
name appears first in Epipha- 
nius, perhaps borrowed from 
Hippolytus, 124; ascribe Fourth 
Gospel to Cerinthus, 125 ; doubt 
as to real existence of, 125 ; evi- 
dence of, really tends to confirm 
Apostolic authorship, 125 sq. ; 
rejection of, by Zeller, 126 ; ne- 
gative witness of, 127 ; Strauss 
on, 211 

Alsace, 253 

Altruism, 463, 465 

Ambrose, 151 

America, 160, 164, 194, 275, 382, 
452 

Ammon, 247 

Ammonius, Harmony of, 381 

Amphilochius of Iconium, his 
date and connexion’ with 


opponent of 


A476 INDEX. 


AMYCLA 


Gregory, 116; his view of the 
Apocalypse, and testimony to 
Fourth Gospel, 116 sq. ; on the 
Canon, 117 

Amycla, Bishop of, on inspiration, 
159 

Anastatius of Sinai, quotes the 
works of Melito, 35; his testi- 
mony to Melito, 39; Canon of, 
121 

Anselm, 152 

Antioch, 117, 121, 186, 399. See 
Church ; Serapion ; Theophilus 

Antoninus Pius, 58 

Aphrahat, Homilies of, 380, 384 

Apocalypse, the, in Irenzeus, 19 ; 
not included in all versions, 
108; rejected by Dionysius, 
110 ; 118; by Cyril, 114; by 
Gregory Nazianzen, 116; by 
Theodore of Mopsuestia, 118 ; 
included by Athanasius, 115; 
testimony of Amphilochius to, 
116 ; no reference to, in Chry- 
sostom, 119 ; testimony of Phil- 
aster to, 122; not accepted by 
Greek church, 122; Hippolytus 
on, 124; and Caius, 361, 392 
sq. ; Alogi ascribe it to Cerin- 
thus, 125; in Canon of second 
century, 147; Bretschneider 
on, 183 sq.; Strauss on, 211 
sq.; Baur on, 233; Hase on, 
252; Reuss on, 255; Sabatier 
on, 256; Weizsiicker on, 257 ; 
Thoma on, 262; Scholten on, 
266 ; Tayler on, 267 ; author of 
Supernatural Religion on, 268 ; 
Abbott on, 272 ; Martineau on, 
289 sq.; 291; Schleiermacher 
on, 302; Lechler on, 322 sq. ; 
Weiss on, 325 ; 405 

Apolinaris of Hierapolis, 34, 102 ; 
his date, 36; lists of his works 
in Eusebius, Theodoret, Pho- 
tius, 36; other works, 37; ex- 
tracts in Paschal Chronicle not 
undoubted, 37 ; reference to the 
Fourth Gospel by, 37, signifi- 
cance of writings of, 37 ; their 
reception by Serapion and other 
bishops, by Jerome, and Socra- 


ATHOS 


tes, 39 sq.; Strauss on, 210; 
Martineau on, 288 

Apollos, 249, 411, 428 

Apology, of Tertullian, 22 sq., 63 ; 
of Theophilus, 29 sq. ; of Athena- 
goras, 63; to Antoninus, 35, 
408. See Justin Martyr 

Apostles, the, named by Clement 
of Alexandria, 21; by Tertul- 
lian, 24 sq.; by Justin, 65 sq., 
67 sq. ; by Papias, 96 

Apostolic Canons, list of, 121; 373 

Apostolical Constitutions, the, 
quoted, 111; reference to Gos- 
pels in, 111; Epiphanius on, 
117 

Aquileia. See Rufinus 

Aquinas. See Thomas 

Aristides. See dilius 

Arius, 127 

Arnold, Matthew, 13 ; on Hippo- 
lytus and Basilides, 101, 371 
sq., 973; on Gnosticism, 101 ; 
quoted, 222 

Arnold, Thomas. See Bunsen 

Arnold-Forster, 446 

Arsenius the monk, Canon of, 121 

Arsenius Sukrean, 407 

Arsinoé. See Hygypt 

Articles, 156 

Asia Minor, 20, 37, 39, 41 sq., 
48, 102, 186, 200, 206, 234, 248 
sq., 252, 256, 260, 265 sq., 295, 
321, 358, 388 sq., 425, 428 sq., 
433, 449. See Church 

Assemani, 381, 385 

Astié, 334 

Athanasian, pseudo-, synopsis, 121 

Athanasius, his date and repre- 
sentative position, 114 ; iden- 
tity of his Canon with our own, 
114 sq.; its inclusion of the 
Apocalypse, 115; Didymus, 
Gregory Nazianzen, and, 115; 
Epiphanius and, 117 ; Rufinus 
and, 122 

Athenagoras, his position as an 
Apologist, 63; Apology of, to 
Marcus Aurelius, 63; use of 
Justin, 69; Strauss on, 210 

Athens, 108, 466. See Church 

Athos, Mount, 359 


INDEX. ATT 


AUBE 


Aubé, quoted, 58 sq. ; on date of 
Polycarp’s martyrdom, 390 

Aucher, and the Diatessaron, 382 

Auckland, 163, 165 

Augustine, his date and com- 
mentary on the Fourth Gospel, 
122 sq., ; on authority of the 
Church, 149 sq. ; on authority 
of the Scriptures, 150 ; 151 

Augustus, empire of, 445 

Aurelius Cyrenius, 39. See 
Marcus Aurelius 

Ayasalouk, 427 


Basrivs, 360 

Bacchius, 53 

Bacon, quoted, 16 ; 152, 351 

Bampton, John, will of, 16 

Bampton Lecturer, 14; if an advo- 
cate or judge, 15 sq. ; 42 sq., 73, 
335 

— Lectures, quoted, 42sq.,131, 177 

Bar-Hebreeus, 121 

Bar-Kochba, 261. 
Martyr 

Barnabas, Epistle of, 97 ; Johan- 
nine influence in, 143, 402; 
Bretschneider on, 185; Holtz- 
mann on, 260 ; 358 

Bar-Salibi, on the Diatessaron, 
381 ; quotes Ephraim, Ammo- 
nius, and Elias, 381 ; his Syriac 
Commentary, 392, 393 

Basel, University of, 248 

Basil, 149 

Basilides, 102 ; and Hippolytus, 
89, 100 sq., 364-373 ; and Pa- 
pias, 100 ; his date questioned, 
100; De Groot and Scholten on 
date of, 100 ; Arnold and Renan 
on Hippolytus and, 101 ; Strauss 
on, 209 ; Bunsen, Keim, Renan 
and Arnold on Fourth Gospel 
and, 370-373; which is the 
true? 365 sq. ; Hort and Renan 
on, 366 sq.; contains quota- 
tions from Fourth Gospel, 368- 
373 ; and meaning of φησίν, 368 
sq., 370 sq. ; 410 

Bathgen, 379, 384 

Bauer, Bruno, view of the Mes- 
sianic idea, 216 ; 235 


See Justin 


BERLIN 


Baur, 5, 17,75 ; and the Clemen- 
tines, 84; and Strauss, 192 sq., 
197 sq., 200, 203, 205, 212 sq., 
214 sq., 217 sq., 219 sq., 223 sq., 
225, 228, 230 sq., 232, 234; 
quoted, 177, 194, 224-231, 364 ; 
early years, 223 ; life at Blau- 
beuren and Tiibingen, 223 sq. ; 
evangelical sympathies, 223 sq. ; 
influence of Schleiermacher and 
Hegel on, 224 ; extent of literary 
work, 225; list of books, and 
shorter writings, 225 sq., 227 
sq. ; his method of investigation, 
228 sq. ; his view of the Pauline 
Epistles, 229 sq. ; on the Canon, 
250; his treatment of Johan- 
nine question, 230 sq., 234; 
Fourth Gospel a ‘tendency- 
writing,’ 230 sq., 422 sq. ; and 
the Gospels, 231 sq., 423 sq. ; 
application of theory of tendency 
to theory of myth, 232 ; stages 
of development and the docu- 
ments, 233 sq.; his followers, 
234 sq., 236 sq. ; and the Hege- 
lian Left, 237 sq. ; his theory an 
arch, 238 sq.; the arch tested, 
its foundations doubted, 239 
sq.; the workmen, Volkmar, 
Hilgenfeld, Ritschl, and Hols- 
ten, questioned, 240 sq., 242 
sq. ; the arch a ruin, 244; 246, 
250, 253, 257, 265, 281 5η., 
335 ; Neander on, 306 ; 308 sq., 
313 sq., 319, 322, 324, 330, 347, 
349 ; on the Philosophwmena, 
363 sq.; on Hippolytus, 366; 
on the Clementines, 374 ; 409 

Baumgarten-Crusius, 334 

Baxter, on inspiration, 159 sq. 

Bec, school of, 152 

Bede, 152; his devotion to the 
Fourth Gospel, 162 8. ; his 
last days, 162 sq. ; compared 
with Lightfoot, 164 sq.; 439 

Belfast, 275 

Belsheim, 359 

Bengel, 193, 224 

Berlin, 177, 192 sq., 236, 238, 
240, 257, 300, 305, 307 sq., 310, 
313 sq., 318, 325, 361 


A478 INDEX. 


BERNARD 


Bernard, 357 

Bert. See Aphrahat 

Bertholdt, 184 

Beyschlag, 325; views on the 
Fourth Gospel, 329 sq. 

Bible, the, use of term by Chry- 
sostom, 120; 130, 132 sq., 135 
sq-, 147, 149, 151; verbal inspira- 
tion a new departure in history 
of, 156 sq. ; external infallibility 
of, attacked by modern criticism, 
157 ; a weapon of Protestant 
against Roman, 156 sq. ; neg- 
lect of, in last century, 176 sq; 
301 ; new translation of, 452 

Blaubeuren, Strauss at, 191 sq. ; 
Baur at, 123 sq., 236 

Bleek, 300, 309; his position, 
313 sq.; on the Fourth Gospel, 
314 sq. ; and De Wette, 314; 
Mangold’s ed. of, 314 sq., 342 ; 
and Ebrard, 317 ; no reference 
to Lightfoot and Westcott by, 
342 ; quoted, 200, 262 

Bodenstein of Carlstadt, treat- 
ment of the Scriptures by, 153 

Bodleian Library,. 393 

Boehme, 192 

Bologna, University of, 152 

Bonaventura, 152 

Boniface, 383 

Bonn, University of, 262, 310, 313 

Boor, De, 394 

Borghesi, on date of Polycarp’s 
martyrdom, 389 sq. ; on date of 
martyrdom of Ignatius, 400 

Boswell, 351 

Boyle, 351 

Bradley. See Green, T. H. 

Bradwardine, 152 

Brescia. See Philaster 

Bretschneider, 5; his life and 
earlier works, 179; his Proba- 
bilia, its purpose and scope, 180 
sq. ; his conclusions : discourses 
largely imaginary, 181 ; author 
not the Apostle, nor Palestinian, 
nor Jew, 182 ; Gospel sprung 
from Jewish anti-Christian zeal, 
183 ; cannot be supported from 
Apocalypse, 183 sq.; nor from 
Epistles, 184; Epistles not 


CANON 


proved Johannine, and strength- 
en adverse views about Gospel, 
184 sq. ; external evidences not 
sufficient, 185 sq.; weight of 
opposing internal evidence, 
place probably Egypt, 186 sq. ; 
importance of his book, 187 ; 
its reception, 187 84. ; was con- 
vinced by replies, retractation, 
‘question is settled,’ 188, 190 ; 
his Handbook of Dogmatics, 
188 ; Strauss and, 189, 212 ; his 
character in Autobiography, 189 
sq. ; his opposition to Schleier- 
macher and Schelling, 190, 194 ; 
200, 246, 247, 299, 302, 308 sq., 
409; on Fourth Gospel and 
Synoptics, 421 sq., 423 ; quoted, 
179-190, 219 

British Association, 454 

British Museum, 392, 406 sq. 

Bruston, 314 

Bryennios, 359 ; ed. quoted, 145 

Buddha, the, 429 

Bunsen, 86 ; on mythic histories, 
196 ; Arnold on, 315 sq. ; on the 
Fourth Gospel, 316; on the 
Phiiosophumena, 362 sq.; on 
Basilides, 370 sq. 

Burgon, 358 

Burscough, 357 

Busse, on date of martyrdom of 
Ignatius, 400 

Butler, 452 

Byzantium. See Leontius 


C.msar, 58, 138 

Caius, his testimony to the Fourth 
Gospel, 111 ; Jacobi on, 361 sq.; 
Baur and Fessler on, 563 sq. ; 
Gwynn on, 392 sq.; Hippo- 
lytus and his Heads agaist 
Caius, 392 sq. 

Calcutta, 435, 462 

Calovius, quoted, 136, 156 

Calvin, views on the Scriptures, 
quoted, 155 sq. 

Cambridge, University of, 17, 43, 
152, 176, 250, 338, 366, 452 
Campbell, Principal, quoted, 52 ; 

103 
Canon, the, history of, 21 ; of New 


INDEX. 479 


CANTERBURY 


Testament, 42; of Old Testa- 
ment, 38, 141; Origen on, 108 
sq.; Eusebius and, 112 sq. ; 
Athanasius on, 114 sq.; Gregory 
Nazianzus, on, 116; Amphi- 
lochius on, 117; Epiphanius 
on, 117; Theodore of Mop- 
suestia on, 118; Chrysostom 
and, 119 sq. ; of Greek church 
in Syria in fifth century iden- 
tical with -Peshito, 120 ; 
close of, in Hast, 121, 151; 
history of, in fourth and suc- 
ceeding centuries, survey un- 
necessary as all accept the 
Fourth Gospel, 121 sq. ; Syrian, 
121 ; of Hilary, Philaster, and 
Rufinus, 122; close of, in 
West, 123, 151; and the Church, 
129 sq., 146 sq. ; a question of 
history, and not of dogma, 147 
sq.; reasons of early Church 
for not providing a Canon, 
141 sq., 146 sq.; Catholic, ne- 
cesary, 147; materials of, in 
second century, 147 ; tradition, 
the first formative principle of, 
158 ; accepted on Church autho- 
rity until Reformation, 151 ; 
Luther and, 154 ; Baur and, 230 

Canterbury, Monastic Library at. 
See Papias 

Capua. See Victor 

Caricus. See Serapion 

Carlisle, Bishop of. See Goodwin 

Carlyle, 11 

Carthage, 33, 38, 108 ; synods of, 
123, 151, See Church; Tertullian 

Caspari, 58, 91 

Cassian, 434 

Catena, 151. See Corderius ; Patti- 
son 

Catholics, acceptance of Fourth 
Gospel by, 20 

Ceillier, on date of martyrdom of 
Ignatius, 400 

Celsus, 127, 185 

Centuries. See Judgment of 

Century, first century, 351 ; 
second century, evidence of, 
17, 53 ; deductions from it, 102 
sq. ; third generation of, 18 sq., 


CHURCH 


102; second generation of, 53 
sq., 102 ; first generation of, 95 
sq., 102 ; second century, 34, 35, 
38 sq., 40 sq., 42 sq., 44 sq., 46 
sq., 48 sq.; position of an apo- 
logist in, 62 sq., 64; 97, 101, 
120, 147, 351; third, 107 sq., 
120, 148 ; fourth, 112 sq., 120, 
148; fifth, 120; sixth, 120; 
seventh, see Anastatius ; ninth, 
36; evidence of sixteen centu- 
ries, 107-166 

Cerinthus,19; Alogiascribe Fourth 
Gospel and Apocalypse to, 125 ; 
Jacobi on, 361; Renan on, 411; 
and δι, John, 434, 436 

Ceylon, 435 

Charlemagne, empire of, 445 

Charteris, 17, 336, 402 

Cheshunt College, 336 

Chillingworth, 135 

Christiania. See Caspari 

Chronicon. See Eusebius 

Chronicon Paschale, 400 

Chrysostom, John, his date and 
writings, 119 sq. ; constant use 
of Fourth Gospel, but no refer- 
ence to Apocalypse, 119 ; other 
works printed with his, 119 sq. ; 
Scriptures are to him Biblia, 
120 ; 149; on Ephesus, 428 

Church, 8 ; of Lyons, 18, 47; of 
Alexandria, 20, 47; of Rome, 
12, 22, 47, 82, 152, 156 szq., 
158 sq., 336, 363 ; of Carthage, 
22, 47; corporate life of, 24 
sq., 47 sq., 70, 97 ; of Antioch, 
27, 47; of Asia Minor, 33, 38, 
40 sq., 117, 402; of Rhossus, 
40 ; of Athens, 47 ; of Corinth, 
47 ; of Ephesus, 47, 144, 185, 
402, 428 sq., 448 sq. ; of Hier- 
apolis, 47; of Sardis, 47; of 
Edessa, 47, 380 ; life in early 
years of second century, 97 ; of 
Italy, 108; Syrian, 120, 379; 
Armenian, 121; Eastern, 108 
sq., 110 sq.; Ethiopian, 121 ; 
Russian, 121 ; Greek, did not 
accept Apocalypse, 122 ; Latin, 
did not accept Epistle to the 
Hebrews, 122; Western, 111 


480 INDEX. 


CIASCA 


sq., 122, 379; and Bible, 147, 
155 sq.; Lutheran, 156, 253, 
326 ; authority of, a reason for 
accepting Fourth Gospel, 128 
sq.; and Scripture, 130 86.» 
132, 137 ; early, did not provide 
a Canon, 141 sq. ; had no need 
at first for a Canon 146 ; writing 
not included in special gifts to, 
140 ; each, its own teachers and 
Gospel, 146 ; Catholic idea of, 
not yet realized, 145 ; depends 
upon the Scriptures, 149; Au- 
gustine on authority of, 149 
sq.; Jerome on authority of, 
150 ; and the council of Trent, 
155; has never accepted a 
mechanical, verbal inspiration, 
157 sq.; Protestant churches 
of Germany, France, Holland, 
America, 160 ; and the Fourth 
Gospel, 161 sq.; English, 164, 
446, 452; and the promised 
Comforter, 418; fourfold form 
of one Gospel received by, 421 ; 
width of, 443 ;. many still out- 
side, 452 ; and the Logos, 452 

Ciasca, on the Diatessaron, 385 
sq., 387; and the Ignatian 
Epistles, 396 sq. 

Cicero, quoted, 180 

Clarendon Press, the, 360, 364 

Clement of Alexandria, 97, 102, 
438 ; his date, origin, teachers 
and pupils, 20 sq.; his Stro- 
mateis, quoted, 20 sq., 88, 100; 
his Protreptikos, quoted, 22; 
no doubt as to Fourth Gospel, 
20, 22; his use of Apocryphal 
writings and gospel of the Egyp- 
tians, 21; his Hxhortation to the 
heathen, 22 ; his Paschal Festi- 
val suggested by Melito, 38 ; his 
teachers probably include Me- 
lito, 388; testimony of Socra- 
tes to, 40; his witness to S. 
John, 48; Excerpta Theodoti 
and Doctrina Orientalis, ascribed 
to, 86; witness to Heracleon, 
88; and Theodotus, 92; and 
Basilides, 100, 365, 367; quoted, 
434, 439 


CREDNER 


Clement of Rome, first Epistle of, 
quoted, 31, 85, 137 ; Johannine 
influence in, 143, 402; Second 
Epistle of, 145; Bretschneider 
on, 185 ;, 254, 338 

Clementines, the, quotethe Fourth 
Gospel, 83 sq., 374 sq.; their 
probable date, 84 sq. ; views of 
De Lagarde, author οὗ Super- 
natural Religion, Strauss, Hil- 
genfeld on, 83 sq. ; the value of 
their evidence, 84 sq., 102 ; their 
antagonism to S. Paul, and 8S. 
John, 85; their origin, 84 sq. ; 
Strauss on, 208, 210; Volkmar 
on, 236; Hilgenfeld on, 242 ; 
Martineau on, 288; 349, 358 ; 
our knowledge of, 373; Dres- 
sel’s discovery and, 374 ; Zeller 
and, 375 

Clericus, 373 

Clermont. See Manuscripts 

Clifford, quoted, 459 sq. 

Clough, quoted, 106 

Cludius, 184 

Codex x, 358 

Codex Borgianus, 387 

Codex Claromontanus, 112 

Codex Fuldensis. See Ranke 

Codex Holmiensis, 358 

Codex Sangallensis, 358 

Codex Tischendorfianus 111.. 358 

Colbertine. See Manuscripts 

Colonies, the, 452 

Constantia, 117 

Constantine, 112 

Constantinople, 114; Trullan 
council of, 121; council of 
Greek church at, 121, 151. 
See Photius 

Conybeare. See Bampton Lectures 

Cook, Commentary, 334 

Corderius, Catena of, 118 

Corinth, 466. See Church 

Corpus Apologetarum. See Otto 

Cosmas Indicopleustes, Canon of, 
121 

Cotelier, 373 

Cowardly Agnosticism. See 
Review, Fortnightly 

Credner, 17 ; on Justin, 57; on 
Eusebius, 113; on the Alogi, 


INDEX. 481 


CRITICISM 


125; ed. of Bodenstein, 153; 
quoted, 112 sq., 115, 118, 316 
Criticism, Modern, 3, 4; admits 
reception of Fourth Gospel at 
close of second century, 46; 
attacks infallibility of the Bible, 
157 ; of ‘our age,’ 169 sq. ; con- 
sidered in Lectures IV., V., 
VI. ; said to have cancelled 
‘judgment of centuries,’ 169, 
409; assertion of, cannot be 
accepted as proof, 169 ; nor yet 
originality, 170 sq. ; destructive, 
not sufficent, 172 ; constructive, 
demanded, 173; Strauss and, 
211; and the Fourth Gospel, 
419 sq. 

— Negative, position of leaders 

of, 8, 299; present school of, 

258 ; German, 258-263 ; Dutch, 
263-266 ; Knglish, 266-292 ; 
is self-destructive, 409; and 
question of author of Fourth 
Gospel, 411 sq. ; no consistent 
body of, 417 

— Positive, 5, 299 sq. ; school of, 
299-353 ; summary of, 353, 
410; is to the negative as 
4=CC, 412 

Cruice, on the Philosophumena, 
363, 367 

Cureton, 35, 3880; and the 
Syriac, 358, 384, 396 sq., 406, 
408 

Cyprian, opinion of Tertullian, 
22 ; use of the Gospels by, 63 ; 
his date and position, 111; his 
testimony to Fourth Gospel, 
112; 149 

Cyril of Alexandria, 149, 407 

Cyril of Jerusalem, his date and 
position, 113; his reception of 
four Gospels, 113 ; rejection of 
Apocalypse 114, 115 ; 121, 149 

Cyril Lukar, Canon of, 121 

Cyrrhus, 381 


Darwin, quoted, 459 ; 460 

Davidson, 8, 267 ; admits recep- 
tion of Fourth Gospel at close 
of second century, 46; his 
position, 272, 274 sq.; his first 


DIONYSIUS 


Introduction, 272 sq.; on the 
newer criticism, 273 sq. ; views 
on the Fourth Gospel, 275 sq., 
277, 278 sq., 280, 284 sq. ; his 
second Introduction, 278 sq. ; 
views on the Acts, 280 sq., 282; 
criticism on his change of view, 
282, 284 sq. ; by Schiirer, 289 ; 
347, 409 ; quoted, 109, 272-282 

Dawson, 454 

Day, 188 

Debeltum. See Alius Publius 

De Cultu Feminarum. See Tertiul- 
lian 

D’Eichthal. See Hichthal 

Delff, his position and views on 
the Fourth Gospel, 292 sq. ; 
compared with Martineau, 293 
sq. ; quoted, 292-295 

Delhi, 462 

Demetrian, 63 

Demurrer against Heretics. See 
Tertullian 

De Prescriptione Hereticorum. 
See Tertullian 

Derry, Bishop of. See Alexander 

Descartes, 8 ἡ 

De Viris illustribus. See Jerome 

De Wette. See Wette 

Dialogue with Trypho. See Jus- 
tin Martyr 

Dialectica. See Galen 

Diana of the Ephesians, 429 sq. 

Diatessaron, The. See Tatian 

Dickson, 246 

Dictionary of Christian Biography, 
19, 28, 41, 86, 90, 119, 362, 
367, 375, 377 sq., 379, 431 

Didache, the, Johannine influence 
in, 148; its title, 145; 358; 
supports Johannine authorship, 
402 

Didymus of Alexandria, his date 
and position, 115; _ rejects 
Second Epistle of 8S. Peter, 
115 

Dilke, Lady, quoted, 15 

Dilthey, 300 

Dindorf, and Eusebius, 406 

Diocletian persecution, 149 

Dionysius of Alexandria, his 
date, 109; his position, and 


ee 


482 INDEX. 


DISCUSSION 


opposition to Nepos, 110; his 
acceptance of Fourth Gospel 
and rejection of Apocalypse, 
110 ; his view opposed to later 
criticism, 110 sq. 

Discussion, tone of, 6 

Doctrina Orientalis. See Valen- 
tinus 

Dodwell, 58 

Dollinger, Von, letter from, on 
date of Muratorian Fragment, 
45; on the Philosophumena, 
363 

Domitian, 394 

Donaldson, 28, 37 

Dressel, his discovery of part of 
the Clementines, 374 sq. 

Drummond, James, on Justin 
and Fourth Gospel, 76 sq., 78 ; 
Abbot’s opinion of, 76 sq. : 
quoted, 431 

Dublin, 17, 340, 392 

Duncker, on Hippolytus, 362 ; 
and Schneidewin, 89, 101, 362, 
367, 369 

Duns Scotus, 152 

Durham, Bishop of. See Light- 
foot ; Westcott 


Easter, 41 

Ebrard, quoted, 200, 334 ; Strauss 
on, 205 ; Bleek and, 314 ; views 
on the Fourth Gospel, 317 ; on 
negative criticism, 318 

Ecclesiastical History. See Huse- 
bius ; Socrates 

Eckermann, 247 

Edersheim, 451 

Edessa, 200, 378, 381. See 
Church 

Edinburgh, University of, 17, 356. 
See Review 

Eegli, on date of Polycarp’s mar- 
tyrdom, 390 

Egypt, 20, 48, 86, 108, 114, 186 
sq., 386, 430; Arsinoé in, 110 

Egyptians, gospel of, 21 

Eichhorn, 178, 184 

Eichthal, D’, views on Fourth 
Gospel, 245 

Einsiedel, Von, 188 

Eleutherus, 19 


EUSEBIUS 


Elias of Salamia, 381 

Elkesaites, 85 

Ellicott, Bishop, New Testament 
Commentary (Watkins), 90, 
425, 441, 444 

Engelhardt, Von, 76 

England, 162, 164, 175, 194, 238, 
337 sq. ; Queen of, 445 ; spread 
of English language and rule, 
445 sq., 448, 452 ; gospels for, 
450. See Church 

Ephesus, 19, 21, 33, 37 sq., 69, 
108, 111, 200, 206, 248, 250, 
252, 257, 261, 313, 319, 327, 
358, 389, 395, 426 ; life in, 427 
sq., 429 sq., 431, 439 sq.; city 
of, 432, 443 sq. ; 454 sq., de- 
scription of, in Acts, 428, 434 ; 
philosophy and meeting of Kast 
and West in, 428 sq., 490 sq., 
456, 467; a nineteenth-cen- 
tury, 447. See Church ; John ; 
Polycrates 

Ephraim, and the Diatessaron, 
377, 381 sq., 383 sq. 

Epiphanius, 57; quoted, 85, 87, 
125; evidence to Ptolemeus, 
87 sq.; his date and position, 
117 ; his list of the Scriptures, 
117 ; his use of term Alogi, 124 ; 
and Hippolytus, 362; and the 
Diatessaron, 378 sq. 

Erlangen, 247, 317, 331 

Europe, 162, 315 

Kusebius, 69; Hist. Eccles. quoted, 
20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 35, 36, 
38-42, 85, 91, 94, 96, 99, 100, 
109 sq., 145, 206, 403, 408, 434, 
439 ; Chronicon, quoted, 28, 29, 
388; his testimony to Tertul- 
lian, 23; testimony to Theo- 
philus, 27 sq. ; his list of Melito’s 
works, 34 sq. ; list of Apolinaris’ 
works, 36; on letter of Sera- 
pion, 39 sq. ; on letter to Victor 
of Rome, 41; and Papias, 96, 
145; silence of, a witness to 
use of Fourth Gospel, 97 ; his 
analysis of writings foresha- 
dowed by Origen, 109, 112; 
and Dionysius, 110; his date 
and position, 112; his testimo- 


INDEX. 483 


EVANGELICAL 


ny to Fourth Gospel and the 
Canon, 112 sq. ; his copies made 
for Constantine, 112 sq.; and 
Athanasius, 114 sq. ; Strauss 
on, 206 sq., 210 sq. ; and Hip- 
polytus, 362; and the Diates- 
saron, 377 sq.; and date of 
Polycarp’s martyrdom, 388 sq., 
390 sq. ; and Epistle of Poly- 
carp, 403; and Lightfoot, 404 
sq.; Syriac version of, 406; 
Armenian version of, 407 sq. ; 
and Syriac Apology to Antoni- 
nus, 408 

‘Evangelical Instrument.’ See 
Tertullian 

Evanson, 5, 8; his career, 174; 
the Dissonance examined, 174 

_ sq.; his preference for S. Luke, 
174 sq.; his work unworthy of 
its subject, 176; replies to, by 
Priestley, Simpson, and Falco- 
ner, 176 sq. ; 246, 299, 308, 409 

Everett, 11 

Ewald, 205, 217, 227; his posi- 
tion and view of Fourth Gospel, 
250 sq.; Liddon and Westcott 
on, 251 

Excerpta Theodoti. SeeValentinus 

Exegesis, Oxford Professor of. 
See Sanday 

Eye, achromatic, 8 sq., 12, 17; 
impossible, 10 


Fables. See Babrius 

Fabricius, 86 

Falconer. See Bampton Lectures 

Falkener, 482 

Farrar, 432 

Faust, quoted, 457 

Faustina, 389 

Fessler, on the Philosophumena, 
364 

Fichte, 177, 240 

Field, 407 sq. 

Fillion, Abbé, 336 

Fisher, 335 

Flatt, 193 

Flavia Neapolis, 53 

Flavius Justinus. 
Martyr 

Flavius Vespasian, 53 


See Justin 


FOURTH GOSPEL 


Florence, 407 

Florinus, 392 ; Letter to, 98 sq. 

Formula Consensus Helvetica, 156 

Forster. See Arnold-Forster 

Fortnightly Review. See Review 

Four Gospels, in Irenseus, 19, 69 ; 
in Clement, 21; identity of 
Justin’s Memoirs with, 70; in 
Origen, 109; in Cyprian, 111 
sq.; in Cyril, 113; in the Dia- 
tessaron, 376 sq., 379, 387. See 
Tatian 

Fourth Gospel, the, Keim and, 3 ; 
modern criticism in relation to, 
4, 419sq. ; a problem of present- 
day thought, 4; position of, in 
second century, 4; evidence to 
reception of, in second century, 
17 ; accepted as the work of 8. 
John, 40 sq.; reception of, in- 
dependent of date of Versions, 
46 ; use of, by Irenzeus, 19 sq., 
69 sq. ; by Clement, 20 sq., 22 : 
by Tertullian, 24; by Theo- 
philus, 29 sq., 31 sq. ; included 
by himamong ‘Holy Scriptures,’ 
and author among ‘ spirit-bear- 
ing men,’ 32; referred to by 
him in connexion with Old 
Testament, 32 sq. ; witness to, 
and reception by churches of 
Asia Minor, 33 sq., 38, 41; 
references in Apolinaris to, 37 ; 
probably quoted by Polycrates, 
42; reception of, at close of 
second century quite certain, 
46 sq.; strength of testimony 
to use of, its extent and unani- 
mity, 47 ; evidence of Justin to 
use of, 61, 64; traces of, found 
in Justin, 65 ; read in Church 
services between A.D. 130-140, 
70, 81; certainly included in 
Memoirs of Justin, 72 sq.; 
Thoma on Justin and, 79 56. ; 
Hilgenfeld on, 75; Abbot on, 
75 sq. ; Drummond on, 77 sq. ; 
Sanday on, 78 sq. ; Westcott 
on, 80 sq.; quoted by the 
Clementines, 83 sq. ; quoted in 
Excerpta Theodoti and Doctrina 
Orientalis, 86 ; accepted by the 


Pre 


484 


FOURTH GOSPEL 


Valentinians and their school, 
87 sq., 89 sq., 91 sq. ; systems 
of Valentinus and Ptolemzeus 
imply, 90 ; accepted by Catholics 
and their school, 90 sq.; unity of 
testimony to use of, by Catholics 
and heretics, 91 sq.; Marcion 
and, 98 sq.; Tertullian and 
Irenzeus on Marcion’s rejection 
of, 93 sq. ; cannot be separated 
from First Epistle, 96, 403 sq. ; 
Ignatius and, 102; accepted 
throughout the second century 
as work of 8. John, 103; facts 
of the reception of, 107 sq.; 
fulness of evidence to use of, 
in third and succeeding centu- 
ries, 107 ; testimony to use of, 
by Muratorian Fragment, 108 ; 
by Versions, 108; by Origen, 
109; by Dionysius, 110; by 
Apostolical Constitutions, 111 ; 
by Hippolytus and Caius, 111, 
392 sq.; by Cyprian, 111 sq. ; 
by Eusebius, 112 ; included in 
copies prepared for Constantine, 
113 ; use of, by Cyril, 113 sq. ; by 
Athanasius, 114 sq. ; by Didy- 
mus, 115; by Gregory of Nazi- 
anzus,115 sq.; by Amphilochius, 
116 sq. ; by Epiphanius, 117 ; 
by Theodore of Mopsuestia, 117 
sq., 119; by Chrysostom, 119 
sq. ; undisputed acceptance of, 
throughout fourth, fifth, sixth, 
and succeeding centuries, 120 
sq., 122; Alogi, the one appa- 
rent exception to acceptance 
of, 123 sq. ; commentaries of 
Jerome and Augustine on, 122 
sq. ; work of Hippolytus on, 
124; Alogi ascribe it to Cerin- 
thus, 125 ; no real men who at- 
tempt to doubt the authenticity 
of, only whispers of Alogi, 127 ; 
principles of the reception of, 
127 sq. ; received as Apostolic 
throughout Christendom from 
end of second to end of eigh- 
teenth century, 128; reasons for 
acceptance of, now, 128; in 
history of the Church, 140; 


INDEX. 


FOURTH GOSPEL 


views held by Christians about, 
128 sq. ; accepted on the au- 
thority of the Church, 128 sq., 
130 sq., 192 ; accepted on the 
inner witness, 132 sq., 134 
sq. ; accepted on verbal inspira- 
tion, 135 sq.; accepted on 
canons of historical and literary 
criticism, 137 sq., 139; evidence 
for genuineness of, superior to 
that of other early histories, 
138 sq. ; aquestion of history, not 
of dogma, 139 ; how received in 
Apostolic age, 140 sq. ; no quo- 
tation of other portions of New 
Testament as ‘Scripture’ in, 
142; how received in _post- 
Apostolic age, 142 sq.; per- 
fected tradition of Ephesian 
Church, 144 ; acceptance of, in 
the Dark Ages, 151 sq.; received 
above all, 152 ; induction as to 
reception of, from the facts and 
principles, 161 sq.; and the 
Church, 161sq. ; comprehension 
exemplified in width of induc- 
tion, 161 sq. ; Apostolic, and in 
fullest sense inspired, 162 ; ex- 
amples of intensity of devotion 
to, 162; results of the ‘ judg- 
ment of centuries’ on, 161, 166, 
409, 411 sq.; and ‘our age,’ 
173, 357 sq., 409 sq., 411 sq. ; 
commencement of destructive 
criticism on, 174; question of, in 
Germany in early years of nine- 
teenth century, 178 sq. ; Bret- 
schneider on, 181-190, 421 sq., 
423 ; Strauss on, 191, 197, 203 
sq., 206-216, 423; result, 212 
sq., 219 ; Liitzelberger on, 200 ; 
Renan on, 219, 421 sq., 423 sq. ; 
Baur on, 228 sq., 234, 239, 422 
sq., 424 ; Hilgenfeld on, 242 ; 
Ritschl on, 243; Stap on, 
244 sq.; d’Hichthal on, 245; 
and the Partition Theories, 246 
sq. ; views of Eckermann, Am- 
mon, and Paulus on, 247; 
Schenkel on, 248; Schweizer 
on, 249; Tobler on, 249 56. ; 
Ewald on, 250 sq. ; Hase on, 


INDEX. 


FOURTH GOSPEL 


252; Reuss on, 253 sq., 255; 
Renan on, 255 sq. ; Sabatier on, 
256; Weizsicker on, 257 ; Wendt 
on, 258; Keim on, 259 sq. ; 
Holtzmann, H. J., on, 260; 
Ho6nig on, 261 ; Thoma on, 261 
sq.; Mangold on, 262 ; Holtz- 
mann on, 262; Scholten on, 
264 sq.; Tayler on, 266 sq. ; 
author of Supernatural Religion 
on, 267 sq. ; Abbott on, 270 sq. ; 
Davidson on, 275 sq., 277, 278 
sq., 280, 284 sq. ; Schurer and, 
283, 424; Martineau on, 286 sq., 
288 sq., 293 sq. ; Delff on, 292- 
295 ; and the positive school of 
criticism, 299 ; Schleiermacher 
on, 302 sq., 304; Neander on, 
305 sq., 8307 ; De Wette on, 309 
sq. ; Liicke on, 310 sq., 312 sq. ; 
Bleek on, 314 sq. ; Bunsen on, 
316; Ebrard on, 317 ; Tholuck 
and Hengstenberg on, 318 sq. ; 
Meyer on, 319 sq., 321 ; Lech- 
ler on, 322 sq. ; Weiss on, 324 
sq.; Luthardt on, 326 sq. ; 
Godet on, 328 sq. ; Beyschlag 
on, 329 sq.; Zahn on, 331; 
Franke on, 332 sq. ; other posi- 
tive writers on, 334 sq., 336; 
value of their testimony, 336 ; 
four special witnesses to, 337 ; 
Lightfoot on, 343 sq., 345; 
Westcott on, 345 sq. ; Salmon 
on, 346 sq., 348; Sanday on, 
348 sq., 8350; quoted in Basil- 
ides, 368-373; quoted in the 
Clementines, though denied by 
Zeller, 374 sq.; if included in 
the Diatessaron, 376, 387 ; Har- 
nack on, 385; importance of 
date of Polycarp’s martyrdom 
in connexion with, 391 sq. ; no 
discoveries oppose Johannine 
authorship of, 393 sq., 395; 
fragments of Papias and Hege- 
sippus support it, 394; recent 
discoveries in connexion with, 
357-395 ;  re-investigation of 
materials in connexion with, 
395-409 ; quoted by Ignatian 
Epistles, 400 sq. ; received by 


485 


FRANKE 


Ignatius, 402; and Epistle of 
Polycarp, 403 sq.; and the 
silence of Eusebius, 404 sq. ; 
no body of negative criticism 
of, which is not self-destructive, 
409 sq.; suggestions of author 
of, other than S. John, value- 
less, 411 sq.; attributed to 
Judas Iscariot by Noack, 412 ; 
interpretation of, 417-470; is 
‘according to 8. John,’ 417 sq., 
419 sq., 444, 449; its inspira- 
tion of essence, not of form, 
418 sq.; contents, not vessel, 
divine, 419 sq. ; the treasure of 
humanity, 420 ; claims to be a 
tendency-writing, 423 sq. ; dif- 
ference in form of, admitted, 
423 sq. ; difference in discourses 
of, 424 sq., 426 ; key to, lies in 
translation, 426 sq., 450; it ex- 
plains tone and thought of, 
442; and opposing views of 
critics, 444 ; traditional account 
of origin of, 438 sq. ; if Johan- 
nine, necessarily Ephesian, 439 
sq. ; and doctrine of the Logos, 
440 sq.; what it had not, and 
what it must have had, 449 sq.; 
more than human, 443 sq.; 
fundamental purpose of, 443; 
divine purpose of, 449 sq. ; 
hints to younger hearers on 
translation of, 453 sq.; and 
science, 454-461 ; and our pre- 
sent ‘laws,’ 456 sq., 458; re- 
veals the origin of being in the 
Logos, 461 ; connexion of, with 
modern ethical science, 462 sq.; 
true principles of life found in, 
463 sq,; and altruism, 465 ; 
and agnosticism, 4606 sq. ; 
preaches no system of gnosis, 
467 ; appeals to the faculty of 
faith, 469; its lessons for the 
individual, 469 sq. ; belongs to 
the nineteenth century as to 
the first, 469 ; its divine pur- 
pose, 469 sq. 


France, 160, 177, 194, 338 
Franke, views on the Fourth Gos- 


pel, 332 sq. 


486 INDEX. 


FRANKFORT 


Frankfort, 201 

Friedlander, on date of Poly- 
carp’s martyrdom, 390 

Fritzsche, 118 

Fuller, 375, 379 

Funk, on date of Polycarp’s mar- 
tyrdom, 390, 396 


GAISFORD, 361 

Galen, 360 i 

Galilee, 249, 395, 440, 443, 445, 
449 


Gallandi, on date of martyrdom 
of Ignatius, 400 

Gaul, 48, 86, 186 

Gautama. See Buddha 

Gebhardt, Von, 359; quoted, 28 
sq., 34, 41, 69, 143, 331, 380, 
390, 394 sq., 402 

Generation, third, of the second 
century, 18; second, 53 sq. ; 
first, 95 sq. ; its meaning often 
missed, 97 

Geneva, 155 

Germany, 84, 160 ; opening years 
of nineteenth century in, 177 
sq.; 175, 194, 238, 241, 275, 304, 
328, 338, 359 

Gervinus, 177 

Gieseler, on date of martyrdom of 
Ignatius, 400 

Gladstone, quoted, 168; 425 

Gloucester and Bristol, Bishop 
of, 13 

Gnosticism, work against, by 
Ireneus, 18; and Valentinus, 
85; view of Arnold on, 101; 
187, 229, 233 sq., 245, 264, 305, 
367, 410; in Ephesus, 428, 
429; and the Fourth Gospel, 
442 sq., 444 

Gnostics, 92, 102; acceptance of 

Fourth Gospel by, 29 ; 348, 371 
sq., 447, 454, 467 

Godet, views on the Fourth Gos- 
pel, 328 sq. ; Meyer and, 343 

Goethe, quoted, 17, 457 

Golgotha, 412 

Goodwin, Bishop, on the Bible, 
158 

Gospels, written and traditional, 
143 ; question of, in Germany in 


HALLE . 


early years of nineteenth cen- 
tury, 178 sq. See Fourth Gos- 
pel; Four Gospels ; Matthew’s, 
S., Gospel; Mark’s, 8., Gospel ; 
Inke’s, 8., Gospel; John’s, 8., 
Gospel ; Egyptians, gospel of ; 
Peter, gospel of ; Justin and the 
Gospels ; Tertullian and the 
Gospels ; Cyprian and the Gos- 
pels ; Strauss and the Gospels ; 
Baur and the Gospels ; Schleier- 
macher and the Gospels 

Gotha, 179 

G6ttingen, 217, 240, 250, 310, 331, 
974 sq. 

Grabe, 88; on date of martyr- 
dom of Ignatius, 400 

Gratry, 251 

Gray, Asa, quoted, 460 

Great Missionary Success. See 
Dilke 

Greece, 20, 48, 450, 445 sq., 456 

Green, J. R., quoted, 163 

— T.H., quoted, 462 

Gregory, 358 

Gregory, ed. quoted, 326 sq., 424 

Gregory the Great, 151 

Gregory of Nazianzus, his date 
and position, 115 sq. ; his list 
of Old and New Testament 
Scriptures, 116; excludes 
Apocalypse though quoted, 116 ; 
his description of 8S. John, 
116 ; and Amphilochius, 116 ; 
149 

Gregory of Nyssa, 149 

Groningen, 100 

Groot, De, on Basilides, 100, 368 

Guardian, The. See Review 

Guhl, 432 

Gundert, on Hippolytus, 366 

Gwynn, 359; on Hippolytus and 
Caius, 392 sq. 

Gymnastica. See Philostratus 


HAARLEM, 922 

Hadrian, 100, 371 

Hagenbach, 177 

Hales, Alexander de, 152 

Hall, 359 

Halle, University of, 177, 240, 
318, 329, 332 


INDEX. 487 


HAMARTOLOS 


Hamartolos, 394 

Hamburg, 304 sq. 

Hardenberg. See Novalis 

Hare, 315, 363 

Harnack, 17 ; opinion on Theo- 
philus’ Commentary, 28 56. ; 
quoted, 28 sq., 34, 41, 69, 143, 
283, 331, 375, 380, 385, 394 sq., 
397, 399 sq., 402 sq. ; on date of 
Justin’s First Apology, 58; on 
the Alogi, 123 sq.; 287, 289, 
359, 382; on date of Poly- 
carp’s martyrdom, 390 sq. ; on 
the Diatessaron, 384 sq., 387 ; 
on Lightfoot, 399; on Igna- 
tian Epistles and Polycarp, 
399 84. ; on Epistle of Poly- 
carp, 403 

Harvard, 17, 76 

Harvey, Wigan, 17; ed. of Adv. 
Her., quoted, 19, 20, 69, 85, 
87 sq., 91 sq., 94, 97, 124, 148, 
391, 403, 434. See Lrenzus 

Ease, “Von, 5,, 179); 204. 227.; 
views on the Fourth Gospel, 
251 sq. ; quoted, 198, 247 

Hatch, 287 

Hausrath, 259 

Hawkesworth, quoted, 11 

Hawkins, quoted, 131 

Hebrews, gospel to the, 186 

Hegel, and Strauss, 192 sq., 196 ; 
and Baur, 224, 237 sq.; and 
Oxford, 238 ; and development 
of philosophy, 238 ; 240, 247, 
281 


Hegesippus, Fragment of, 394 

Heidelberg, University of, 236, 
248, 257 

Heinrici, 86, 90 

Heliand, The, 383 

Hemphill, 375, 378, 380 

Hengstenberg, 193 sq. ; views on 
the Fourth Gospel, 318 sq. 

Henoch, book of, 185 

Heracleon, and Valentinus, 85 ; 
his date and position, 87 86. ; 
testimony of Irenzeus, Clement, 
and Origen to, 88; his writings, 
88; and Tertullian, 92; Bret- 
schneider on, 186; Strauss on, 
210; Martineau on, 288 


HIPPOLYTUS 


Herbart, 240 

Herder, 177, 204 ; quoted, 178 

Hermas, the Shepherd of, 143, 
185, 345, 402 

Hermathena, the, 392 

Herodotus, 138 sq. 

Hess, 204 

Heyne, 195, 216, 315 

Hierapolis, 433. See Apolinaris ; 
Church ; Papias; Philip 

Hilary of Poitiers, his date and 
Canon, 122; and Origen, 122; 
151 ; 

Hilgenfeld, 17, 227, 245, 283, 398, 
409; admits reception of 
Fourth Gospel at close of 
second century, 46; on Justin 
and Fourth Gospel, 75 ; on the 
Clementines, 84, 374 sq.; on 
Ptolemzeus and the Valen- 
tinians, 88 ; on Heracleon, 88 ; 
on the Alogi, 124; his works, 
235; and Baur’s theory, 241 sq. ; 
and Volkmar, 242; on the 
Diatessaron, 379; on date of 
Polycarp’s martyrdom, 390 ; 
quoted, 125, 219, 242, 266, 381, 
394 

Hill. See Johnson 

Hippo, synod of, 123, 151 

Hippolytus, pupil of Clement, 20 ; 
mentions Irenzeus and Melito, 
38 ; his testimony to use of 
Fourth Gospel by Valentinians, 
89 ; quotes S. John, 89; and 
Irenzeus, 91 ; and Basilides, 100 
sq., 364 sq., 366 sq. ; opinions 
of Arnold and Renan on 
Basilides and, 101; his testi- 
mony to the Fourth Gospel, 
111; and Philaster, 122; and 
the Alogi, 124; his Syntagma 
of Thirty-two Heresies, and work 
on Gospel and Apocalypse, 
124 ; may have derived informa- 
tion from Irenzus, 124 ; Jacobi 
on, 361 sq.; Duncker on, 362 ; 
Bunsen, Lommatzsch, Von 
Déllinger, and others on, 363 
sq.; Gwynn on, 392 sq.; his 
Heads against Caius, 392 sq. ; 
quoted, 368 sq. 


488 INDEX. 


HOLLAND 


᾿οδηγός, ed.Gretser, quoted, 35, 39 

Holland, 160, 359 

Holsten, his works, 236; on 
Baur’s theory, 243 

Holtzmann, H. J., views on the 
Fourth Gospel, 260 ; 287, 315; 
on Hippolytus, 366 ; quoted, 
131, 234, 258, 264 

Holtzmann, O., his views on the 
Fourth Gospel, 262 sq. 

Holy Scripture. See Scriptures 

Homer, 195 

Homilies. See Aphrahat ; Cle- 
mentines 

Honig, his views on the Fourth 
Gospel, 261 ; quoted, 372 

Horace, quoted, 172 

Horne, 285 

Hort, 17, 32, 358 ; on Justin, 57 
sq.; on Hippolytus and Basi- 
lides, 366 sq. 

Hosmer, 11 

Hossbach, 310 

Hug, 178 

Hugo of 8. Victor, 152 

Hulsean Lectures. See Good- 
win 

Hume, David, quoted, 11; 284 

Hurst, 177 

Hutton, 314, 335 

Huxley, quoted, 454, 460, 465 


Icontum, 116 

Ignatian Epistles, the ; and Vos- 
sian recension, 101 sq. ; if by 
Ignatius, connect Fourth Gos- 
pel with S. John, 102 ; Strauss 
on, 208 ; Lightfoot on, 395-402 ; 
Zahn on, 397; De Pressensé 
and Harnack on, 399 sq. ; quote 
the Fourth Gospel, 400 sq. ; 
and Epistle of Polycarp, 402 sq. 

Ignatius, 97, 102 ; recent investi- 
gations of, 101 sq. ; Johannine 
influence in, 143 ; Bretschnei- 
der on, 185; 338, 392; date 
of martyrdom, 400, 404; seven 
Letters written by, 400; Fourth 
Gospel received by, 402 

India, 445, 452 

Innocent the First, 123 

Inquiry, width of, 5 


ITALY 


Inspiration, Luther on, 153 sq. ; 
Calvin on, 154 sq.; Zwingli on, 
155 ; extended to letter of Bible, 
156 ; mechanical verbal, 156 
sq. ; Westcott on, 158 ; Bishop 
of Carlisle on, 158; Newman 
on, 158 sq. ; Bishop of Amycla 
on, 159; Baxter on, 159 sq. ; 
Neander on, 160; in relation to 
Fourth Gospel, 418 sq. 

Instrumentum. See Tertullian 

Introduction to course of Lec- 
tures, 3 

Ionian. See Melito 

Irenzeus, his date, 18; bishop of 
Lyons, 18 ; work against Gnosti- 
cism, Adversus Hereses, 18, 61; 
quotes Apology and Dialogue of 
Justin, 69 ; his use of the Fourth 
Gospel, 19 sq., 69 ; pupil of Cle- 
ment, 20; mentioned by Hip- 
polytus, 98 ; his witness to the 
Fourth Gospel, 48 ; compared 
with Justin, 53; unity with 
Justin, 59, 81; his intimate 
connexion with and knowledge 
of Justin, 69 sq., 91 ; connected 
with Ephesus, Rome,and Lyons, 
69 ; and identity of term Gospels 
with Memoirs of Justin, 72 sq. ; 
his testimony to Valentinus, 85, 
90 sq.; and Ptolemzeus and 
Heracleon, 87 sqg., 92; named 
by Tertullian, 90 sq.; and 
Marcion, 94; and Papias, 96 ; 
testimony to Papias and Poly- 
carp by, 97 sq., 99 ; his Letter to 
Florinus, 98 sq. ; testimony of 
Socrates to, 40; 43, 102, 365 ; 
and the Alogi, 124 ; and the four- 
fold Gospel, 147 ; Strauss on, 
209, 211 sq. ; Bretschneider on, 
185 sq. ; Lightfoot on, 344 sq. ; 
and Polycarp, 391 sq.; and 
Epistle of Polycarp, 403 ; Adv. 
Her., quoted, 19, 20, 69, 85, 87 
sq., 91 sq., 94, 97 sq., 124, 148, 
391, 403, 434 

— Editor of. See Harvey 

Isidore, 371 

Issus, 40 

Italy, 20, 48, 86, 116, 338 


INDEX. 489 


JACOBI 


Jacosi, 177, 300; on the Philo- 
sophumena, 361 sq. ; on Hippo- 
lytus, 365 

Jameson, Mrs., 435 

Jarrow, school at, 152, 162 

Jebb, 388 

Jena, University of, 177, 235, 334, 
376 


Jerome, on Tertullian, 22; De 
Viris Ulustribus, quoted, 22, 23, 
24, 28, 34, 38, 403; reference 
to Theophilus by, 28 ; his list of 
works by Melitoand Apolinaris, 
34 ; quotes Tertullian on Melito, 
38 ; his testimony to Apolinaris 
and Melito, 40; his date, and 
commentary on the Fourth Gos- 
pel, 122 sq. ; on church authority 
in matter of the Scriptures, 149 
sq., 151 ; 362, 435; on Epistle 
of Polycarp, 403 

Jerusalem, 53; council at, 121; 
149, 347, 412, 429, 443 

Jesuits, 10 

John, S., Irenzus on, 19; and 
the ‘ spiritual Gospel,’ 21; and 
the robber, 21; named by Ter- 
tullian, 25 sq., 27 ; influence of, 
in Apology of Melito, 35 ; Fourth 
Gospel accepted as work of, 41, 
43, 46 sq.; description of, by 
Polycrates, 42 ; life and work 
of, familiar to many, 95 sq.; 
Polycarp’s personal link with, 
48, 95 sq., 391; named by Dio- 
nysius, 110; described by Gre- 
gory Nazianzen, 116 ; his know- 
ledge of other portions of New 
Testament writings, but he 
never quotes them, 142; Bret- 
schneider on 182-85, 421 szq., 
423 sq. ; Lightfoot on school of, 
343 sq. ; Renan on, 421 sq., 423 
sq. ; in fragments of Papias and 
Hegesippus, 394; 361, 392; 
and the Gospel, 419, 443 sq., 
449 ; realization of his position, 
427 sq. ; of his work, 434 sq. ; 
and teaching, 436 sq. ; close of 
his life, 438 sq. ; and Philo, 431, 
436, 441 ; and Cerinthus, 434, 
436; his declaration of the 


JUSTIN 


Logos, 440 sq. ; and agnosticism, 
466 sq. See also Fourth Gospel 

— Gospel of, quoted, 30, 31, 32, 
42, 87 sq., 89, 107, 207 sq., 249 
sq., 259, 261, 265, 369, 393, 400 
sq., 417 sq., 435 sq., 437, 440 sq., 
467 

— Epistles of, 109, 118, 119 sq., 
462 ; quoted,442 ; Bretschneider 
on, 184 sq. ; Strauss on, 206 sq. ; 
Martineau on, 291; witness of 
Epistle of Polycarp to, 403 sq. 

— Revelation of. See Apocalypse 

John Damascene, list of, 121 

John of Salisbury, 152 

Johnson, on testimony, 350 sq. 

Jonas. See Dilthey 

Judea, 249. See Justin Martyr 

Judas Iscariot, 412 

Judge, advocate or. See Bampton 
Lecturer 

‘ Judgment of Centuries,’ 3, 4 sq. 
value of, 6; result of, 161 sq., 
166, 169, 417 ; contrasted with 
‘our age,’ 172 sq., 409 sq., 411 
sq. ; considered in Lectures I., 
ΠῚ EEL. 

Julian, 127 

Julianus, 389 

Jiilicher, 394 

Junilius, list of, 121 

Justin Martyr, 102 ; Dialogus cum 
Tryphone, quoted, 34, 53 sq., 55, 
59 sq., 65 sq., 67, 71; his date 
and early life, 53 ; training and 
conversion, 54 sq., 429 ; his con- 
nexion with a Stoic, Peripatetic, 
Pythagorean, and Platonist, 54 
sq.; his ethics of opinion, 55 
sqg.; his writings, 56 sq. ; two 
Apologies and Dialogue cer- 
tainly genuine, 56; his First 
Apology, its dedication, 58 ; 
a defence of Christians ad- 
dressed to heathen, 61 sq.; 
written at Rome, 69; quoted, 
53, 54, 56, 59, 65 sq., 67, 71 sq., 
77, 91; his own account of the 
Dialogue, 59 sq. ; its scene at 
Ephesus, 69 ; written at Rome, 
69 ; addressed to Marcus Pom- 
peius, 60 ; an apology for Chris- 


490) INDEX. 


JUSTIN 


tianity addressed to Jews, 62; 
his First Apology and Dialogue 
only considered, 56; quoted 
by Irenzeus, 69 sq. ; chronology 
and dates not accurately known, 
56 sq., 58 84. ; opinions of 
Credner, Volkmar, and Hort on, 
57 sq.; discussion of his date 
of literary interest, 58; does 
not affect-result, 59; internal 
evidence of First Apology and 
Dialogue as to date, 59 sq. ; their 
evidence as to use of Fourth 
Gospel, 61 sq.; Trypho and the 
war in Judea, 59 sq. ; if Trypho 
is really Rabbi Tarphon, 60 ; 
and the Gospels, 61; unity of, 
with Irenzus, 59; nature of an 
apology, 61 sq.; and position 
of an apologist in second cen- 
tury, 62 sq. ; verbal quotation 
not to be sought in, 63 sq., 
72 sq. ; compared with Tatian, 
Athenagoras, Tertullian, Cy- 
prian, 63; traces of Fourth 
Gospel in, 65 sq. ; recurrence of 
term Memoirs in Apology and 
Dialogue, 65 sq., 67 sq., 145 ; The 
Memoirs, 65; Memoirs of the 
Apostles, 65 sq., 70 ; Memoirs of 
His Apostles, 66,70 ; his Memovrs, 
66 ; Memoirs relate to our Lord 
Jesus Christ, 67,70; Memoirs com- 
posed by His Apostles, which are 
called Gospels, 67, 70; Memoirs 
which are read on the day called 
Sunday, 65 sq., 70 ; considered 
as, a written record of the 
Lord, 67 ; sacred books, 67 sq. ; 
of Apostolic authority, 68 ; 
coming from the Lord, 68 ; his 
description of the Sunday ser- 
vice, 65, 67 sq.; use of his 
writings by contemporaries and 
followers, 68 sg. ; by Tertullian, 
68 sq. ; by Irenzeus, 69 sq. ; his 
intimate connexion with Ire- 
neus, 69 sq., 91; link with his 
pupil Tatian, 70 ; the Diatessa- 
von a key to the Memwirs, 71, 
375 sq., 387 ; his identification 
of the Memoirs with the Gos- 


KORNER 


pels, 71; the Dialogue and the 
term ‘Gospel,’ 71 sq. ; one term 
used for outsiders, another for 
Christians, 72 ; this understood 
by Irenzus, Tertullian, and 
others, 72 ; Fourth Gospel cer- 
tainly included in Memoirs of, 
72 sq.; recent investigations on, 
by Thoma, 73 sq.; Hilgenfeld, 
75 ; Abbot, 75 sq. ; Drummond, 
76 sq.; Sanday, 78 sq.; West- 
cott, 80 sq. ; consensus of 
opinion on, 81 ; his use of Fourth 
Gospel and belief in Apostolic 
origin, 81 sqg.; why Fourth 
Gospel not more fully quoted 
in, 81 sq.; reasons suggested, 
82 sq. ; existing works of, frag- 
ments, 83 ; named by Tertullian, 
90 sq.; his Syntagma against 
all Heresies, 91; and Valen- 
tinus, 92; and Marcion, 93; 
Bretschneider on, 182 sq., 185; 
Strauss on, 208 sq. ; Abbott 
on, 270; Martineau on, 288 
sq. ; 236, 260 sq. ; 334, 348, 
392 
Justin the Gnostic, 364 
Justinus Priscus, 53 


Kaiser, 224 

Keim, 5; quoted, 259 sq., 279; 
on ‘our age,’ 3; on Justin 
and Fourth Gospel, 82; and 
Strauss, 205; views onthe Fourth 
Gospel, 259 sq. ; on Basilides, 
371; on date of Polycarp’s 
martyrdom, 390 ; 263, 320 sq., 
409 

Kern, 192 

Kerner, 192 

Khayyath, 119 

Kiel, 331 sq. 

Kihn, 118 

Klassen, 431 

Kling, 282 

Klopstock, 211 

Klotz, ed. of Stromateis, quoted, 
20, 21, 88, 100; Protreptikos, 
22; 434 

Kliipfel, 224 

Korner, 178 


INDEX. 49] 


KOSTLIN 


Kostlin, his works, 235 sq. ; and 
Baur’s theory, 241 

Krabbe, 305 

Krehl, 406 

Kriiger-Velthusen, 249 

Kurtz, on date of martyrdom of 
Ignatius, 400 


Lagppi-Manst, 118 

Lachmann, 315, 358 

Lacordaire, 14 

Lactantius, 63 

Ladd, quoted, 152, 156 

Lagarde, De, on the Clementines, 
83 sq. ; 315, 379; on the Dia- 
tessaron, 377, 386 

La Motte Fouqué, 177 

Lampe, 122, 428 

Lancashire Independent College, 
275, 284 sq. 

Lang, 264 

Lange, 184, 335 

Laodicea, council of, 121, 151. 
See Sagaris 

Lardner, 37 

Lausanne, 335 

Lazaro. See Monastery 

Leathes, 335 

Le Bas, 389 

Lechler, his works, and views on 
the Fourth Gospel, 321, 322 sq. ; 
331; quoted, 359 

Lectures : I., 3-50; II., 51-104 ; 
III., 105- 166 ; Ἐν: 167-220 ; 
W., 221-296; ie 297-354 ; 
VIL., 355-413 ; VIL. , 415-471 

--- Division of, 4, 5 ; subject of, 3 

Leipzig, 179 sq., 247, 322, 326, 331 

Leontius of Byzantium, and Theo- 
dore of Mopsuestia, 118 

Lessing, 211 

Letronne, on date of Ῥο θαυ Β 
martyrdom, 389 sq. 

Levy, 440 

Lewin, 492 

Lewis, Sir G. Cornewall, opinion 
of, 7; quoted, 298, 352 

Leyden, University of, 100 

Lias, 335 

Lichtenberger, 256, 301, 312 

Liddon, on the Old Latin, 42; 
on the Peshito and Muratorian 


LOOFS 


Fragment, 43; on Ewald, 251; 
335 

Lightfoot, Bishop, 14 sq., 17, 45, 
272, 283; quoted, 19, 29, 31, 
34, 37, 41 sq., 365, 375 sgq., 
377 sq., 381, 388, 391, 394 sq., 
396 sq., 398 sq. ,400 sq., 402, 404 
sq. ; on the Muratorian Frag- 
ment, 45; on the first gene- 
ration of the second century, 
97; and Irenzus, 98 sq. ; and 
author of Supernatural Religion, 
48 sq., 267 sq., 269 sq., 350; 
his intense devotion to 8. John 
and the Fourth Gospel, 163 
sq. ; his last days, 164 sq. ; un- 
noticed by Bleek and Weiss, 
342 ; his character as a witness, 
337 sq.; views on the Fourth Gos- 
pel, 343 sq., 344 sq., 345 ; value 
of his testimony, 351 sq. ; onthe 
Diatessaron, 376 sq., 379; on 
the date of Polycarp’s martyr- 
dom, 391; on Papias, 394; 
on the Ignatian Epistles, 395- 
402 ; convinced of their authen- 
ticity, 396 sq.; Zahn on, 396 
sq. ; Hdinburgh Review on, 398 ; 
on Zahn, 398; Harnack on, 
399 ; on the silence of Eusebius, 
404 sq. ; 408, 452 

Lipsius, 17, 19 ; quoted, 86, 90, 
125 ; on Hippolytus, 364, 366 ; 
on Tatian, 376 sq.; on the 
Diatessaron, 380; on date of 
Polycarp’s martyrdom, 390; 
Lightfoot on, 396 

Livy, 138 

Lloyd, on date of martyrdom of 
Ignatius, 400 

Logos, the, doctrine of, 68, 80, 
124, 183, 259 sq., 261 sq., 265, 
431, 436 sq., 440 sq., 442, 452, 
461 

Loman, 5; admits reception of 
Fourth Gospel at close of second 
century, 46 

Lombard, Peter, 152 

Lommatzsch, on the Philosophu- 
mena, 363 

London, 270 

Loofs, 257 


492 INDEX. 


LOTZE 


Lotze, 240 

Lucius Verus, 58 

Liicke, quoted, 115, 247, 310; 
235, 300, 439; on the Fourth 
Gospel, 311 sq., 313; on the 
newer theories, 312 

Ludwigsburg, 191, 201 

Luke, 8., Gospel of, quoted by Cle- 
ment, 22; by Justin, 65, 71; 
Marcion and, 93 ; Gregory Na- 
zianzen on, 116; 421 

Luthardt, 263; views on the 
Fourth Gospel, 326 sq.; quoted, 
424 

Luther, views on the Scriptures, 
quoted, 153 sq. ; he is to be 
the judge of what is and is not 
Scripture, 154; and the Re- 
formation, 178; quoted by 
Meyer, 321 

Liitzelberger, and Strauss, 200 

Lycaonia, 116 

Lydia. See Melito 

Lyons, 33, 69, 345. See Church 


McCuintock and Strong, Cyclo- 
pedia, 196 

Mackay, 217 

Mackintosh, Sir James, 10, 284 ; 
quoted, 11 

McLellan, 335 

Mallock, W. H., quoted, 12 

Manchester, 266, 275, 454 

Manchot, 100, 264 

Mangold, views on the Fourth 
Gospel, 262; and Bleek, 314 
sq., 342 

Mansel, 365 ; on Hippolytus, 366 

Manuscripts, 5; Clermont, 35 ; 
Syriac, 35, 406 sq.; Chaldee, 
118°; Uncial, 120 3sq., 138; 
Colbertine, 373 ; Arabic, 385 sq. 

Marburg, 920 

Marcion, Tertullian and, 26 sq., 
91 sq. ; Theophilus against, 
27 ; a witness to Fourth Gospel, 
83, 102 ; his date and position, 
93; his gospel a mutilated S. 
Luke, 93; why he did not 
choose 8. John, 93; Tertullian’s 
testimony to, 93 sq. ; [renzeus 
and, 94; estimate of his testi- 


MELITO 


mony, 95; Strauss on, 124, 
209, 236, 264; Martineau on, 
288 

Marcus, and Valentinus, 85 

Marcus Aurelius, 58, 389. See 
Apolinaris ; Athenagoras ; Eu- 
sebius 

Marcus Pompeius. 
Martyr 

Marheineke, 179 

Mark, 8., Gospel of, if quoted by 
Justin, 66; Gregory Nazian- 
zen on, 116; 223, 421 

Marklin, and Strauss, 191 sq. 

Marquardt, on date of Polycarp’s 
martyrdom, 390 

Marsh, 172 

Martin, 359 

Martineau, James, 76; views on 
the Fourth Gospel, 286 sq., 288 
sq., 411; quoted, 267, 286-291; 
on Justin, Clementines, Valen- 
tinus, Ptolemzus and Hera- 
kleon, Marcion, Apolinaris, 
Theophilus, 288; on Apoea- 
lypse, 289 sq. ; on Paschal con- 
troversy and time, 290 sq.; on 
First Epistle, 291 ; summary of 
his views, 291 sq. ; compared 
with Delff, 293 sq. 

Martyrdom. See Ignatius ; Poly- 
carp 

Masson, on date of Polycarp’s 
martyrdom, 388 

Massuet, 58 

Matthew, S., Gospel of, quoted by 
Clement, 22; by Justin, 65 sq., 
71, 82; 12, 64; Gregory Na- 
zianzen on, 116 ; 260,357, 421 sq. 

Matthew, the monk, Canon of, 121 

Maulbronn, 192 

Maurice, 315, 334 

Maussul, 119 

Max Miiller, on faculty, 469 sq. 

Mechitarist Fathers, 377, 381 sy. 

Melito of Sardis, his date, 34 ; 
literary activity, 34; list of 
his works, in Eusebius, Ana- 
statius of Sinai, Syriac frag- 
ments, 34 sq. ; some genuine, 
others doubtful, 35 ; Westcott’s 
opinion on the Apology of, 35 ; 


See Justin 


INDEX. 493 


MEMOIRS 


contemporary of Apolinaris, 
36 ; significance of his writings, 
37; testimony to, by Poly- 
crates, 38, 41 ; by Hippolytus, 
Tertullian, Clement of Alex- 
andria, Anastatius, 38 sq. ; re- 
cognized as an authority in 
Carthage, Ephesus, Rome, 
Alexandria, Monasteries of 
Sinai, 38 sq.; probably the 
Ionian named by Clement, 38 ; 
his connexion with the East, 
38 sq. ; his use of Justin, 69 ; 
102; and Apology of Anto- 
ninus, 408 

Memoirs. See Justin Martyr 

Mémré da-Yéya, 440 sq. 

Mendel. See Neander 

Mental achromatism. See Achro- 
matism 

Merx, and Armenian version of 
Eusebius, 407 sq. 

Metrophanes Critopulus, Canon 
of, 121 

Meyer, on the Tiibingen school, 
246 ; quoted, 324, 343; views 
on the Fourth Gospel, 319 ; 
on negative criticism, 320 sq. ; 
makes no use of Westcott and 
Godet, 342 sq. 

Michaelis, quoted, 171 sq. 

Mildert, Van, 131, 452 

Mill, J. 8., 14 

Miller, 367; his edition of the 
Philosophumena, 360 sq., 362 

Milligan, 335 

Miltiades, 91 

Milton, 272 

Minucius Felix, use of Justin, 


Modern criticism, See Criticism 

Mohler, 225 ; on date of martyr- 
dom of Ignatius, 400 

Moller, on Hippolytus, 366 ; 
quoted, 375 

Mommsen, quoted, 425, 432 sq. 

Monastery, of ὃ. George, 118 ; of 
S. Lazaro, 382 

Monoimus, 364 

Monophysites, work of Anastatius 
against, 35 

Montanism, and the Paraclete, 


NEUCHATEL 


33, 444; Apolinaris and, 36; 
Strauss on, 210 ; 186, 264. See 
Tertullian 

Montfaucon, 119 sq. 

Moore, Aubrey, quoted, 459 sq., 
461 

Mopsuestia. See Theodore 

Morcos, and the Diatessaron, 386 

More, Hannah, on the Bible, 177 

Mosinger, and history of the 
Diatessaron, 382 sq., 387 

Moulton, 335 

Miller, 300. See Max Miiller 

Mulhall, 446 

Munich, 177 

Muratorian Fragment, 42, 116 ; 
Liddon and Westcott on, 49 sq. ; 
its date, 43 sq. ; not settled, 44 
sq. ; Lightfoot and Von Dollin- 
ger on, 45; question of date 
will not affect evidence of, 46; 
its testimony to use of Fourth 
Gospel in third century, 108 ; 
and traditional origin of Fourth 
Gospel, 438 sq. 

Murphy, 335 

Murray, Dictionary of English 
Language, 463, 466 

Mynas, his discoveries, 559 sq., 
364 ; quoted, 360 

Myth, Strauss on, 196 sq., 214 
sq., 216, 423; Bunsen on, 196 ; 
earlier and later theories of, 216 
sq. ; theory of, cannot live with 
Design, 218 


NaasEnI, the, 372 sq., 429 

Nablous, 53 

Napoleon, 178, 445 

Nathaniel, 411 

Nazianzus. See Gregory 

Neander, on inspiration, 160 sq. ; 
178, 197, 205, 229, 248, 300, 
304 ; his change of name from 
Mendel, 305 ; special qualifica- 
tions, 805; on the Fourth 
Gospel, 305 sq., 307 ; and 
Liicke, 310 ; 315, 328 

Negative criticism. See Criticism 

Nepos, 110 

Neubauer, 427 

Neuchatel, 328 


494 INDEX. 


NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE 


Newcastle-on-Tyne, 454 

Newman, Cardinal, on Tertullian, 
22 sq. ; on inspiration, 158 sq. ; 
on discourses in 8. John, 425 

New Testament. See Testament 

— — Commentary. See Ellicott 

Nicene council, 121 

Nicephorus Callistus, Canon of, 
121 

Nicephorus, Stichometry of, 121, 
362 

Nicodemus, gospel of, 186 

Nicolaitans, 19 

Niebuhr, 195, 315 

Nisibis, Persian school of, 121 

Nitzsch, 300 

Noack, attributes Fourth Gospel 
to Judas Iscariot, 412 

Noris, Cardinal, on date of Poly- 
carp’s martyrdom, 388 

Norton, 63, 334 

Novalis, 177 

Nyssa. See Gregory 


OckHAmM, William of, 152 

Oehler, 17; ed. quoted, 25-28, 
57, 63, 85, 87 sq., 91 sq., 94, 
117, 122, 124 sq., 378 sq. See 
Tertullian 

Old Latin. See Versions 

Old Testament. See Testament 

Olshausen, 334 

Oosterzee, Van, 335 , 

Ophites, the. See Naaseni 

Oratio ad Grecos. See Tatian 

Orelli, and Strauss, 199 

Origen, pupil of Clement, 20; 
69, 149, 331, 407; his witness 
to Heracleon, 88; his date, 
108 ; his division of the sacred 
writings, and full testimony 
to 5. John and the Fourth 
Gospel, 109 ; commentaries on 
Fourth Gospel, 109 ; and Euse- 
bius, 112; and Hilary, 122; 
and the Philosophwmena, 360 
sq., 900 sq. 

Otto, Von, 17; Corpus, quoted, 
28, 29 sq., 31 sq., 33 sq., 41, 
53 sq., 55 sq., 59 sq., 63, 65 
sqg., 67, 69, 71 sq., Τῇ, 376; 
notes, 31, 32; on name Apolin- 


PEARSON 


aris, 34 ; on work by Apolinaris, 
36 ; on Justin, 66, 71 
Overbeck, 364 
Oxford, University of, 12, 43, 
152, 238, 250, 359, 445, 452 
— House, 462 


Paci, on date of martyrdom of 
Ignatius, 400 

Palestine, 20, 114, 187, 348, 426 

— Exploration Fund, 358 

Pantenus, 20 

Papias, 97, 102, 343 ; Apolinaris, 
his successor, 36; his date, and 
testimony to the disciples of 
the Lord, 96 ; probably known 
to Irenzus, 96 ; his Hxposition, 
96 ; its title, 145; his use of 
the First Epistle of S. John, 
96 ; witness to use of Fourth 
Gospel, 97; testimony of 
Irenzeus to, 97 ; and Basilides, 
100 ; in Eusebius, ‘the living 
and abiding voice,’ 145; Bret- 
schneider on, 185 ; Strauss on, 
206 sq.; MSS. of, at Canter- 
bury and Worcester, 357 ; newly 
discovered fragments of, sup- 
port Johannine authorship, 394 

Papirius, 41 

Paraclete, the, 33, 124, 265, 439, 
442, 444 

Paris, 359, 361, 373 

— University, 152, 256 

Parsons, quoted, 176 

Pascal, quoted, 2 

Paschal Chronicle. See Apolinaris 

Paschal controversy, 33 ; Strauss 
on, 212 ; Martineau on, 290 

Paschal Cycle, 379 

Pastor of Hermas, Von Déllinger 
on, 45 

Patmos, 21, 394 

Patriarchs, the Twelve, 185 

Pattison, M., Catena Aurea, and 
Essays, 12 sq. 

Paulus, 178, 204, 318; view of 
Fourth Gospel, 247 

Pearson, 58; on date of Poly- 
carp’s martyrdom, 388; on 
date of martyrdom of Ignatius, 
400 


INDEX. 495 


PERATICI 


Peratici, the, 364 ; Peratx, 373 

Peripatetic. See Justin Martyr 

Peshito. See Versions 

Peter, gospel of, 40, 66 

Petermann, 396 

Petersburg, 8., 406 

Pfleiderer, 287 

φησίν, meaning of, 368 sq., 370 
sy., 372 

Philaster of Brescia, his date, 
122; a historian of heresies, 
122 ; probably borrowed from 
Hippolytus, 122 ; quoted, 125 

Philip of Hierapolis, 41 

Philip of Side, 594 

Philippi, 402 

Phillips, 380 

Philo, 68, 410 ; and Plato, 430 sq., 
441 ; and the Logos, 431 ; and 
S. John, 456, 457 

Philosophumena, the, Strauss on, 
209; Miller’s edition of, 360 
sq., 362; importance of the 
discovery of, 364 ; views on, 365 
sq.; independent of views on 
Fourth Gospel, 367 

Philostratus, 360 

Photius of Constantinople, 39 ; 
reference to Apolinaris by, 36 ; 
quoted, 36 sq. ; Canon of, 121 

Phrygia, 395. See Apolinaris 

Pilate, Acts of, 185 

Pitra, Cardinal, 35, 359, 385 sq. 

Pius, Antoninus, 85 

Plato, 60, 300, 338, 356; and 
Philo, 451, 441 

Platonist. See Justin Martyr 

Plummer, 335, 363, 402, 425 

Plumptre, Dean, 135, 452 

Poitiers. See Hilary 

Polybius, 139 

Polycarp of Smyrna, 41, 48, 97, 
102 ; his martyrdom and pro- 
bable date, 95; modern dis- 
coveries in relation to, 387- 
992 ; older view, 388 ; modern 
view, 389 sq. ; his personal link 
with S. John, 95 sq. ; his use of 
First Epistle of 8. John, 96; 
his writings, 96; testimony of 
Trenzeus to, 98 sq., 391; Bret- 
schneider on, 185; Strauss on, 


READING 


211 ; 143, 269, 338, 343; his 
Epistle, if genuine, 402 sq. ; his 
Epistle, and Ignatian Epistles, 
402 sq., 404 

Polycrates of Ephesus, testimony 
to Melito by, 38 ; his date, 41 ; 
letter to Victor of Rome, 41 ; 
his position and influence, 41 
sq. ; accepts the Fourth Gospel 
as work of S. John, 42; de- 
scribes S. John, 42 ; 102, 343 

Ponticus. See Serapion 

Pope, quoted, 13 

Porphyry, 127 

Portus, 263 

Positive criticism. See Criticism 

Postillz, 151 

Pothinus, 18 

Potter, 86 

Praxeas, Tertullian’s reply to, 27 

re 6; anti-theological, 

sq. 

Pressensé, De, 335; on Ignatian 
Epistles, 399 ; 432 

Prevorst, clairvoyante of, 192 

Priestley, on Evanson, 176 

Probabilia, the. See Bretschneider 

Proculus, 91 

Protreptikos. See Clement of 
Alexandria 

Psalms, the, quoted by Justin, 
66 ; by Polycarp, 143 

Ptolemzus, and Valentinus, 85 Ξ 
his date and position, 87 Cr i 
testimony to, by Irenzus, 
Kpiphanius 87 sq. ; by Clement 
and Origen, 88 sq. ; by Hippo- 
lytus, 89 ; his Epistle to Flora, 
preserved by Epiphanius, 87 sq. ; 
edited by Hilgenfeld, 88 ; his 
system implies Fourth Gospel, 
90; and Irenzeus, 92; Strauss 
on, 210 ; Martineau on, 288 

Piinjer, 303 

Pythagorean. See Justin Martyr 


QUADRATUS, 388 sq. 


Ramsay, 358 

Randell, 389 

Ranke, ed. of Codex Fuldensis, 379 
Reading Church Congress, 80 


496 INDEX. 


RECOGNITIONS 


Recognitions, the doubtful, 185 

Reformation, the, 151; altered 
view of Scriptures at, 153 sq. ; 
Luther and, 178 

Renan, 5, 14 ; admits reception of 
Fourth Gospel at close of se- 
cond century, 46; on Hippo- 
lytus and Basilides, 101; and 
Strauss, 195, 204 sq., 212, 219 ; 
251; quoted, 8, 9, 10, 29; 
views on the Fourth Gospel, 
255 sq., 411 sq.; on Basilides, 
367, 371 sq.; on date of Poly- 
carp’s martyrdom, 390; 398, 
409 ; on Fourth Gospel and 
Synoptics, 421 sq., 423 sq. ; on 
Ephesus, 427, 429, 432, 433 sq. 

Resch, 143 

Rettig, 247 

Reuss, quoted, 109, 140, 254, 255; 
views on the Fourth Gospel, 
253 

Review, North American, 11; 
Fortwightly, 12, 13; in Guar- 
dian, 12; The Academy, 45 ; 
Atheneum, 285; Nineteenth 
Century, 76, 285, 446; Church 
Quarterly, 339 ; Quarterly, 340 ; 
Contemporary, 97, 330, 344 sq., 
377, 391, 404, 460 ; Edinburgh, 
398 

Réville, 264, 431 

Reynolds, 335 

Rhossus. See Church 

Rich, the, collection. See British 
Musewm 

Richardson, 391, 400 

Riehm, 333 

Riggenbach, 335 

Ritschl, 5; his works, 235; 
and Baur’s theory, 242 sq.; on 
the Philosophumena, 364 

Roberts. See More 

Roberts, Alexander, on date of 
martyrdom of Ignatius, 400; 
427 

Romanticists, the, 177 

Rome, 19, 33, 38, 43, 48, 61, 86, 
108 ; and Tertullian, 23, 69 sq. ; 
and Irenzus, 69; and Justin, 
83; and Valentinus, 85; and 
Marcion, 98 ; and Hippolytus, 


SCHENKEL 


111; 186 sq., 358 sq., 374, 386 
sq., 395, 404, 430, 445 sq. See 
Church ; Victor 

Ronsch, 17 

Roscelin, 152 

Rosenmiiller, 385 

Rossi, De, 359 ὺ 

Routh, 41, 363; on date of mar- 
tyrdom of Ignatius, 400 

Rowan, quoted, 300 sq. 

Riickert, 383 

Rufinus of Aquileia, his date and 
relation to the Canon, 122; and 
Athanasius, 122 

Ruinart, on date of martyrdom of 
Ignatius, 400 


SABATIER, views on the Fourth 
Gospel, 256 

Sagaris of Laodicea, 41 

Salamia. See Elias 

Salamis, 117 

Salmon, 17; quoted, 37, 44, 151, 
362; on the Alogi, 127; on 
Supernatural Religion, 269 sq. ; 
character as a witness, 339 sq. ; 
views on the Fourth Gospel, 
346 sq., 348; 392 

Salzburg, University of, 382 

Samaria, 395, 412 

Sand, Ludwig, 307 

Sanday, 17; quoted, 29, 41, 
338; on Justin and Fourth 
Gospel, 78 sq., 80; his opinion 
of Abbot and Drummond, 79; 
and Abbott, 80; on Lightfoot, 
337 sq. ; character as a witness, 
341 ; views on the Fourth Gos- 
pel, 348 sq., 349 sq., 350; 268, 
358 

Sardis. See Church ; Melito 

Saxony, 179 

Schaff, on Neander, 304, 335 ; 
365, 402 

Schaft-Herzog, Encyclopedia, 275, 
285 

Schanz, 336 

Schebest. See Strauss 

Schelling, 177; and Bretschneider, 
190 ; and Strauss, 192 sq. ; and 
Baur, 240 

Schenkel, views on Fourth Gos- 


INDEX. 497 


SCHILLER 


pel, 248 sq.; and De Wette, 
308 ; 258, 260 

Schiller, on date of Polycarp’s 
martyrdom, 390 

Schlegel, 177 

Schleiermacher, 178, 179 ; Strauss 
and, 189, 192 sq., 205, 211 sq. ; 
Bretschneider and, 190, 194 ; 
influence of Schelling and, 193 ; 
Baur and, 224, 252; his posi- 
tion and character, 299, 300 sq. ; 
his writings, 301 sq. ; treatment 
of New Testament, 302; and of 
the Apocalypse, 302; special 
views on the Fourth Gospel, 302 
sq., 304 ; and the Gospels, 302, 
304; and De Wette, 307 ; and 
Liicke, 310 sq. ; and Bleek, 313 

Schmid, on date of martyrdom of 
Ignatius, 400 

Schmidt, 178 

Schmieden, 223 

Schneidewin. See Duncker 

Scholten, 5; on Apolinaris, 37 ; 
admits reception of Fourth 
Gospel at close of second cen- 
tury, 46; on date of Basilides, 
100; his position, 263; his 
views on the Fourth Gospel, 
264 sq., 266; and Martineau, 
287, 291 ; on Hippolytus, 366 ; 
335, 349, 409 

Schulze, 184 

Schiirer, 17; on Davidson, 283 ; 
and the Fourth Gospel, 283 ; 
quoted, 263, 278, 382, 394, 399 

Schwarz, 177, 195 

Schwegler, 17; his works, 235; 
236, 243, 373 sq. 

Schweizer, Strauss on, 212 ; 
views on Fourth Gospel, 249 
Science, ‘ laws or principles’ of, 

454 sq. ; not ultimate, 455 sq. ; 
and Fourth Gospel, 456 sq. ; 
no plea for its temporary ex- 
pression, 458 sq.; leaders of, 
dumb before origin of being, 
459 sq. ; ‘origination ’ and, 460 
sq. ; modern ethical, 461 sq. 
Scriptures, 24, 41, 115, 116 sq., 
118, 120, 123, 143 sq. ; tradition 
and interpretation of, 131 ; and 


SPENCER 


the Church, 129 sq., 131 sq. 
134."sq., 197. 141, 157 ; me- 
chanical verbal inspiration of, 
136, 157 ; not always accepted 
by Anglican communion, 157 
sq. ; or Roman communion, 158 
sq. ; or English Protestants, 159 
sq.; or foreign Protestants, 
160 sq.; New Testament not 
regarded as, 142; Moses and 
the Prophets regarded as, 141 ; 
first quoted by heretics, 146 sq. ; 
tradition one with, 148 sq. ; de- 
pend upon the Church, 149; 
Augustine on authority of, 150 ; 
Jerome on authority of, 150; 
how received in Dark Ages and 
until Reformation, 151 sq. ; 
altered view of, at Reformation, 
152 sq.; Bodenstein’s views on, 
153 ; Luther’s views on, 153 sq. ; 
Calvin’s views on, 154 sq.; 
Zwingli’s views on, 155; and 
Council of Trent, 155; infal- 
libility of, substituted for infal- 
libility of the Church, 155 sq.; 
this infallibility attacked by 
modern criticism, 157 

Scrivener, 358 

Serapion of Antioch, his date, 39; 
his letter to Caricus and Ponti- 
cus, and testimony to Apoli- 
naris, 39; his position and 
attention to the Canon, 40; 
testimony of Socrates to, 40 

Sermon, on the Mount, 64, 422. 
See Lecture 

Shaftesbury, 14 

Sibylline Oracles, 185 

Side. See Philip 

Simon Magus, 364 

Simpson, on Evanson, 176 

Smith, Payne, Dean, 376 sq. 

Smith, R. T., on date of martyr- 
dom of Ignatius, 400: 

Smyrna, 432. See Polycarp 

Socrates, Hist. Hccles. quoted, 
40; testimony to Apolinaris, 
Trenzeus, Clement, Serapion, 40 

Somerset, 176 

Soulier, 431 

Spencer, Herbert, quoted, 459, 463 


i Kk 


498 INDEX, 


SPIEGEL 


Spiegel, 264 

Stanley, Dean, quoted, 13 86. ; 
196, 515 

Stap, his works, and view of the 
Fourth Gospel, 244 sq. 

Steitz, 35, 227 

Steudel, and Strauss, 199 sq. 

Stoic. See Justin Martyr 

Storr, 193, 224 

Strack and Zockler, 326 

Strasburg, 253, 260, 262 

Strauss, 5, 8; on Apolinaris, 
37; quoted, 179, 198, 200- 
219, 231, 247 sq., 252, 304; 
admits reception of Fourth 
Gospel at close of second 
century, 46; on the Clemen- 
tines, 84; and Bretschneider, 
189 ; and Schleiermacher, 189, 

_ 192 sq., 211 ; home life, 191 ; at 
Blaubeuren and Tiibingen, 191 
sq., 193; at Maulbronn and 

erlin and return to Tubingen, 

193; his contemporaries and 
surroundings, 192 sq. ; calm 
of 1834, succeeded by storm 
of 1835, 194; the Leben 
Jesu, 194-200 ; the replies, 
194 sq. ; ‘nothing new’ in 
it, 195; critical methods, 195 
sq. ; and the ‘mythical theory,’ 
195 sq., 214 sq., 216 sq., 218 sq., 
423 sq.;and Steudel, 193sq. ; and 
the Gospels, 195 sq., 196,-213 
sq., 215 sq. ; bound by Hegelian 
Left, 196; and Ullmann, 197 ; 
and Baur, 192 sq., 197 sq., 200, 
203, 205, 212-sq., 214 sq., 217 
sq., 219 sq., 223 sq., 225, 228, 
230 sq., 232, 234; his uncer- 
tainty, 197 sq.; life between 
third and fourth editions, 198 
sq. ; nomination to Ziirich, and 
rejection, 199; fourth edition 
of Leben Jesu, and Christliche 
Glaubenslehre, 200 ; and Agnes 
Schebest, 201; describes his 
own fate, 201; in parliament, 
and political views, 201 sq. ; no 
theological work, 1840-64, other 
literary work of, 201 sq. ; the 
new Leben Jesu, 202-219 ; for 


SYRIAC 


whom written, 203 sq.; and 
Renan, 204, 219; reviews 
earlier Lives of Jesus, 204 
sq. ; on Papias and Eusebius, 
206 sq., 210; on the Ignatian 
Kpistles, 208 ; on Justin Martyr, 
208 sq. ; on the Clementines, 
208, 210; on the Philosophu- 
mena, 209 ; on Basilides, Valen- 
tinus, Marcion, Tertullian, 209 ; 
on Irenzeus, 209 sq., 211; on 
Theophilus, Tatian, and Athena- 
goras, 210; on the Alogi, 211; 
on the Apocalypse, 211 sq.; 
summary of views on Fourth 
Gospel, 212 sq.; his critique 
that of Tiibingen school, 213 ; 
conscious and uncouscious fic- 
tion, 214; the Messianic idea, 
215 sq.; his disappointment, 
217 ; on Ewald, 217 ; 236, 246 
sq., 267, 284, 300, 308 sq., 318 
sq., 371, 409; on the Clemen- 
tines, 375 ; on criticism, 411 

Stromateis. See Clement of Alex- 
andria 

Stuttgart, 225 

Sukrean. See Arsenius 

Supernatural Religion, author οὗ, 
14 sq. ; review in The Academy 
by, 45; admits reception of 
Fourth Gospel at close of 
second century, 46; on the 
Gospels, 48 sq. ; his answer no 
answer, 49; on the Clemen- 
tines, 84; his views on the 
Fourth Gospel, 267 sq. ; criti- 
cism of Zahn and Salmon on, 
269 sq.; on anonymity, 350; 
and the Diatessaron, 376 ; 375, 
404 

Supplicatio pro Christianis. See 
Athenagoras 

Swabia, 191, 193 

Sweden, 359 

Swete, 119 

Switzerland, 84 

Sychem, 53 

Sylburg, 86 

Syria, 86 

Syriac, fragments contain writ- 
ings of Melito, 35 ; version of 


INDEX. 499 


TACITUS 


Eusebius, 35; 108, 408. See 
Cureton 


Tacitus, 138 sq. 

Tanner, 151, 148 

Tarphon, Rabbi. 
Martyr 

Tatian, 57, 82, 102; as an apolo- 
gist, 63 ; his Discowrse to Greeks, 
63 ; a compiler of four Gospels 
—the Diatessaron—63, 70 sq. ; 
use of Justin, 69; the Diates- 
saron a key to Memoirs of 
Justin, 71, 387 ; Bretschneider 
on, 185; Strauss on, 210; San- 
day on, 348; modern discovery 
of Diatessaron, 375-387 ; Arme- 
nian version of, 376 sq. ; refer- 
ence to, by Eusebius, 377, 379 ; 
and Epiphanius, 378 sq.; not 
known in Greek and Latin 
churches, but in Syrian, 379 ; 
probably written in Syriac, 379 
sq. ; older than the Curetonian, 
384; Theodoret on, 380 sq. ; 
commentary on, in Ephraim’s 
works, 382 sq. ; and Victor of 
Capua, 379, 383; 292 

Tayler, views on the Fourth 
Gospel, 266 sq. ; Martineau and, 
285 sq., 291 

Taylor, Bayard, quoted, 457 

Teller, 318 

Tendency, Baur on, 197, 422 sq. 

Tertullian, 68, 102; his date, 
position, and influence, 22; 
Cyprian on, 22; Jerome on, 22, 
23; Cardinal Newman on, 22 
sq. ; Eusebius on, 23; his train- 
ing, 23; native of Carthage, 
23; connexion with Rome, 
23, 69 sq.; his Montanism, 
23 sq.; Tertullianists, 24 ; he 
quotes fromthe Fourth Gospel, 
24; passages from his works, 
24 sq.; De Cultu Feminarum, 
quoted, 23; De Prescriptione 
Hereticorum, quoted, 25 sq., 
85, 92; Adversus Marcion, 
quoted, 26 sq., 92, 94; Adver- 
sus Praxean, quoted, 27; Adver- 
sus Valentinianos, quoted, 91 ; 


See Justin 


THEODORE 


De Resurrectione Carnis, quoted, 
92; De Carne Christi, quoted, 
94; use of instrumentum = tes- 
tamentum, 26, 92; Strauss on, 
209 ; ‘ Evangelical Instrument,’ 
26 ; his testimony to 8. John, 
25 sq., 48; his testimony to 
Melito, 38; his use of the Old 
Latin, 42 sq.; use of the Gos- 
pels, 65, 68 sq.; his Apology, 
and To the Gentiles, 63; his 
references to the Gospels and 
Justin, 68 sq., 70; identity of 
term Gospels with Memoirs of, 
Justin, 72 sq.; his unity with 
Justin, Lrenzeus, and others, 90 
sq.; his treatment of, and posi- 
tion with regard to, the Valenti- 
nians, 91; contrasts Valentinus 
and Marcion, 91 sq.; and Hera- 
cleon, 92 ; and Marcion, 93 sq.; 
probably follows Irenzeus in 
his treatment of Marcion and 
the Valentinians, 94; 139; 
Strauss on, 209 

Testament, New, 4, 42, 44, 62, 63 
sq.; demand for quotations in 
second century from, unreason- 
able, 64 sq.; 107 sq., 109, 112 
8)... E14 βὴτ 116} 50. 119 "s0., 
128, 133 sq., 135, 188 ; no idea 
of writings for whole Church 
in, 140 sq. ; terms used do not 
include idea of writing, 140; 
oral traditions and, 141 ; term 
‘Scripture’ in, 142; not re- 
garded as ‘ Scripture,’ 142 sq. ; 
little formal quotation from, in 
post-Apostolic age, 142 sq. ; 
its Canonicity could not be 
until Catholicity of Church 
was, 146; the child of the 
Church, 148 ; 195, 206, 209, 
211, 231, 245 sq., 279, 282 sq., 
285, 301 sq., 307, 319, 325, 333, 
339, 342, 418, 422, 440, 442 

— Old, 38, 62, 116, 119, 136, 138, 
142, 143 sq., 195 sq., 215, 261, 
265, 307, 319, 332 sq., 380, 441 

Testamentum. See Tertullian 

Thenius, 335 

Theodore of Mopsuestia, his date 


500 | INDEX. 


THEODORET 


and position, 117 sq. ; opinion 
of his opponent Leontius, 118 ; 
his treatment of the Canon, and 
reception of Fourth Gospel, 
118 sq. 

Theodoret, his reference to Apoli- 
naris, 36, 59; on the Diates- 
saron, 380 sq. 

Theodorus Balsamon of Antioch, 
list of, 121 

Theodotus, 85, 92 

Theologi, the, 427, 431 sq. 

Theophilus of Antioch, 102; his 
date, 27 ; three books T'0 Autoly- 
cus, 27sq. ; its date, 29 ; quoted, 
29 sq., 32 sq., 416; compared 
with quotations from 8. John, 
30 sq.; Against the Heresy of 
Hermogenes, 27; other works, 
27 sq. ; use of Rev. of 8. John, 
27 ; testimony of Eusebius to, 
28; testimony of Jerome to, 
28 ; his Commentary on the Gos- 
pels doubtful, 28 ; opinions of 
Zahn and Harnack on, 28 sq. ; 
his view of testimony, 29; his 
undoubted reference to Fourth 
Gospel, 29 sq., 31 sq., 405 ; and 
to S. John by name, 32; his 
use of Justin, 69; Strauss on, 
210 sq. ; Bretschneider on, 185 
sq. ; Martineau on, 288 

Thiersch, 354 

Thirlwall, Bishop, 301 

Tholuck, Strauss on, 207 ; reply 
to De Wette, 308 ; views on the 
Fourth Gospel, 318 sq. ; 332 
homa, on Justin and ὃ. John, 
73 sq.; views on the Fourth 
Gospel, 261 sq., 263 

Thomas, 8., 30 

— Aquinas, 12, 152 

Thrace. See Mlius Publius 

Thucydides, 138 sq., 338, 425 

Tigris, 118 

Tillemont, on date of martyrdom 
of Ignatius, 400 

Tischendorf, 335, 358 

Titus Flavius Clemens. SeeClement 

Tobler, his position and view of 
the Fourth Gospel, 249 sq. ; 
Martineau on, 287 


VALENTINUS 


Toynbee Hall, 462 

Trajan, 100, 259, 279, 327 

Translation, key to the Fourth 
Gospel, 426, 442 sq., 447, 453; 
a problem for all time, 444 sq.; 
relation of Universities to pro- 
blem of, 447 sq. ; its difficulties, 
450 sq. ; only leaders can face 
it, 448, 450 sq., 452 sq. 

Tregelles, 358, 363, 438 

Trendelenburg, 240 

Trent, council of, 121; its date, 
and action regarding the Scrip- 
tures, 155, 158 

Truth, 15 ; qualifications required 
to judge of, 7, 8; everything 
sacrificed to, 16. Of Truth. 
See Bacon 

Trypho. See Justin Martyr 

Tiibingen, 126, 236, 322 

— School, New, 211, 213, 219, 
223, 234 sq., 238, 245 sq., 248, 
250, 257 sq., 327, 364, 371, 374 
sq., 398 

— University, 192 sq., 194, 224, 
234, 336 

Turrianus, 373 

Tyndall, quoted, 459 

Tyne, 162 

Tyrannus, school of, 428 


UEBERWEG, on date of martyrdom 
of Ignatius, 400 

Uhlhorn, 335 ; on Hippolytus, 
366; on date of Polycarp’s 
martyrdom, 390 

Ullmann, 197 

Ulrici, 240 

Ulster, 275 

Uncial manuscripts. See Manu- 
scripts 

Usher, on date of Polycarp’s mar- 
tyrdom, 388 ; 398; on date of 
martyrdom of Ignatius, 400 


VALENTINUS, 245; school of, 19 ; 
witness of, to Fourth Gospel, 
83, 102 ; his date, training, posi- 
tion, and disciples, 85 sq., 87; 
his separation from the Church, 
and value as a witness, 85 sq. ; 
followers form two schools, 86 ; 


INDEX. 501 


VALESIUS 


in Kast, Hacerpta Theodoti and 
Doctrina Orientalis, 86; in 
West, Ptolemzus and Hera- 
cleon, 87 sq.; their use of 
Fourth Gospel, 88 sq.; and 
Hippolytus, 89 ; his system im- 
plies Fourth Gospel, and so 
does the school, 90 ; testimony 
of Irenzus, Justin and Tertul- 
lian to, 90 sq., 92; conclusion 
as to his use of Fourth Gospel, 
92 sq. ; Bretschneider on, 185 
sq. ; Strauss on, 209 sq. ; 
Martineau on, 288 

Valesius, 388 

Vane, Sir Henry, 10 sq. 

Vater, 195, 307 

Vatican, 158, 374, 385 sq., 386 

Venables, 28 

Venice, 377, 382, 407 

Versions, Old Latin and Peshito 
Syriac, 42 ; Liddon and West- 
cott on, 42 sq. ; their dates, 42 
sq., 108, 198 ; force of evidence 
if early date established, 44 ; 
verdict to be awaited, 45 ; ques- 
tion of date will not affect evi- 
dence, 46; their testimony to 
use of Fourth Gospel, 108 ; not 
all New Testament included, 
but certainly Fourth Gospel, 
108 ; of the Syrian Church, 120 
sq. 2 XX, 145.5: Syriac, of 
EKusebius, 406 sq. ; Armenian, of 
Eusebius, 407 sq. 

Victor of Capua, 379, 583 

Victor of Rome, 41 

Victoria, Queen, 445 

Vienne, 345 

Villemain, his search expedition, 
359 sq. 

Vischer, 289 

Volkmar, admits reception of 
Fourth Gospel at close of 
second century, 46; rejects 
evidence of Epiphanius about 
Tatian, 57; considers date of 
Justin does not affect result, 
57, 59; on Messianic idea, 
216; his works, 256 ; on Baur’s 
theory, 240 sq. ; Hilgenfeld on, 
242; 210, 316, 320 sq., 335, 


WESTCOTT 


349 ; on Hippolytus, 364, 366 ; 
on date of Polycarp’s martyr- 
dom, 390; on date of martyr- 
dom of Ignatius, 400; on Cle- 
mentines, 374 ; 409 

Vossian Letters. See Ignatian 
Epistles 


Wace, 235; on the Diatessaron, 
382 sq. 

Waddington, on date of Justin’s 
First Apology, 58; on date of 
Polycarp’s martyrdom, 389 54., 
391 

Ward, Humphry, 454 

— Mrs. Humphry, Robert Els- 
mere, quoted, 6, 170; New 
Reformation, quoted, 76 

Warfield, 359 

Warington, quoted, 144 

Wear, 164 

Weimar, 308 

Weinsberg, 192 

Weismann, 454 

Weiss, 319; his works, 323 sq. ; 
views on the Fourth Gospel, 
324 sq., 326; notices no English 
writer, 342 sq. 

Weisse, 5, 205, 212, 227, 258°; 
his position, 247 ; views on the 
Fourth Gospel, 248 

Weizsicker, 17, 227, 287, 294; 
views on the Fourth Gospel, 
257 

Welcker, 216 sq. 

Wendover, Mr. See Ward, Mrs. 

Wendt, views on Fourth Gospel, 
257 sq. 

Westcott, Dr.,1 17 ; quoted, 32, 
34, 109, 143, 441 ; on Melito, 
35; on the Old Latin, 42; on 
the Peshito and Muratorian 
Fragment, 43 sq.; on Justin 
and Fourth Gospel, 80 sq.; on 
inspiration, 158 

— Bishop, on Ewald, 251; 268, 
037 ; on the Fourth Gospel, 345 
sq., character as a witness, 338 


1 Consecrated Bishop of Durham, 
May 1, 1890, and after that date re- 
ferred to as Bishop Westcott. 


502 


WESTMINSTER 


sq. ; unnoticed by Bleek, Weiss, 
and Meyer, 342 sq. ; 358, 452 

Westminster, 159 

Westphalia, 139 

Wette, De, 178, 194, 195, 197 sq., 
300; on Tiibingen school, 245 
sq. ; his life and liberal views, 
307 sq. ; on the Fourth Gospel, 
308 sq., 310 ; Schenkel on, 308 ; 
on Liicke, 310 sq. ; on Bleek, 
314 

Whately, 14 

White, 358 

Wieseler, on date of Polycarp’s 
martyrdom, 590; on date of 
martyrdom of Ignatius, 400 ᾿ 

Wiesinger, 334 

Wilberforce, 177 

Williams, Monier, 446 

Winer, 178 

Witness, friendly and adverse, 13 
sq.; value of a, 350 sq.; re- 
quisites in a, 351 sq. 

Wolf, Bibliothece Hebree, quoted, 
60 ; 195 

Wood, 358, 989, 432 sq. 

Worcester, Cathedral Library at. 
See Papias 

Word of the Lord, 143 sq., 145, 
154 

Wordsworth, Bishop, 334, 358 ; 
quoted, 143, 362, 580; on date 
of Polycarp’s martyrdom, 390 

Wright, on the Diatessaron, 380, 


INDEX. 


ZWINGLI 


407; on Syriac version of 
Eusebius, 406 sq., 408 
Wirtemberg, 195, 201, 223 


XENOPHON, 138 sq. 


YatxE College, 335 
York, school of, 152 
Yorkshire, 176 


ZAHN, 17, 359; on Theophilus’ 
Commentary, 28 sq. ; quoted, 
31, 60, 72, 87, 93, 145, 395, 
402; on the Alogi, 123 sq. ; 
on Supernatural Religion, 269 ; 
his position, 330 sq. ; views on 
the Fourth Gospel, 351 sq.; on 
the Diatessaron, 379, 380, 383 
sq., 385 sq. ; on date of Poly- 
carp’s martyrdom, 390; on 
Lightfoot, 396 sq. ; Lightfoot 
on, 398 ; on date of martyrdom 
of Ignatius, 400 

Zeller, 75; on the Alogi, 126; 
and Strauss, 193, 202, 207, 219 ; 
his works, 236 sq.; 227 sq., 243, 
318 ; on the Clementines, 374 sq. 

Zimmermann, 190 

Zockler. See Strack 

Zonaras, Canon of, 121 

Ziirich, 199, 218, 236, 249, 287, 
917 

Zwingli, views on the Scriptures, 
quoted, 155 


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; i rly Caries Le HOY Tk td ὃ ὙΠ νὰ nee ΩΝ υ ny: 

ἡ ͵ ᾿ ᾿ Νὰ i PAA ETE be ie i iM hy Rent Ἢ ᾿ ἫΝ 


οι τὸς ἐς 
> - 


Uo 


ee Seis onal cee 
1 


| 
| 


Ve 


Ae “ae 


ARNO os en Sa Siem τσοὶ 
~<a te eae ewe ano 


“σις ων 
Se ee έν, τσ’ ee eee αὶ 


A eine 


ἢ PP EE REN OL de or ee Og me oy ere, 
a el a De ecko 


= ona pet pact a c J 
ποῦν σ΄, Retro Boag ce NE pele pn per fable amie tina eminence plain Grosser fer 
LR I AR A OE Ge ποτ RR Pe eT Hy 


re 


ae mer 


IT BA OAL RPI Ὁ, IR OI OME πο I ANGLE EO 0 ον MG πνοὴ A 

τας ᾿ ΝΟΥ ne ee 

SAME ESOS CSE SIRI 08 AEE SLND AE OE POPS = TU eee SEO FIRES”, MYO OL HS ig ete AV IO CRN nO RH LT I NIE SS 
OO aN apne te ay be Gm Set ant, Ihe tO Se ᾿ ᾿ - ᾿ ν 


at eyes 
γα, ἡ τσ σον. 


Se ᾿ τω τορυν ᾿ 


se ne 
eae het guar Ok cance nei aiehae once 
Boe aeince beta ana 


